AI scanner used in hundreds of US schools misses knives
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I carried a knife to school every day. Granted, I used it as a pry bar more than as a knife, and opened a lot of boxes with it, but somehow it wasn't a big deal. I brought one into show and tell in kindergarten. My father's generation kept guns at school to go hunting with after school.
Meanwhile, you can be killed without any tools, or with improvised weapons. Banning all weapons does not make an area safe. I'm not even sure it makes it safer - there are plenty of examples in US schools alone of kids being murdered (or nearly murdered) without any weapons at all.
The problem is much, much deeper than mere 'access to weapons', even supposing you could remove weapons entirely - which you can't - and that's even ignoring the fact that weapons are not a specific class of items. What makes something a weapon is how it is used. Cars are the most obvious point to make, here, but you could just as easily use a chair or anything else that gives you more reach, a harder hit, mechanical advantage to cause more damage, etc. Thinking you can look around a room and detect and remove all the weapons is ridiculous, humans are far too versatile for such a childish attitude to be effective. A room with no weapons in it has no people in it.
Have people attack the dummy, starting from the other end of the room. Some participants will be given weapons like guns or knives, others will have to improvise with what's in the room. Measure the time it takes and use health monitoring devices to estimate the level of physical effort the participant applied.
Without doing this experiment I'm already pretty confident that a plot of time to kill will show the group given guns far ahead of the knife group or improv group. After all, they only have to aim and pull the trigger while the other groups have to move across the room. Likewise, the gun group would show far lower physical effort than the others, from the movement across the room as well as the greater need to directly apply human-sourced force. The knife group has to swing / stab / slice with enough force to meet the death conditions. The improv group has to potentially disassemble or rip apart something to then have a sharp or blunt instrument, then they still need to apply their own force like the knife group. Naturally this might change somewhat if we go nuts with the guns, like big heavy rifles or machine guns. Those would require some substantial physical effort. But handguns or the average AR-15? Not really.
Guns are a fast, low effort way to apply potentially lethal damage to a human target. You can absolutely apply lethal damage to a human in an uncountable number of other ways, but they are almost universally slower and higher effort.
Thus, we see frequent mass killings using guns, but knife incidents with high death totals are pretty rare.
"did you know that 20% of car accidents happen under the influence?
well that means in return that 80% of accidents happen with sober drivers!
i hence request immediate action and emergency beer stations to be established on all roads."
I was really annoyed, so I cataloged all the knives already present in the school. I walked into the teachers break room (no one really noticed me): three kitchen knives on the drying rack. The wood shop had tons of sharp knife-like tools. Pointed scissors in the art room. A teacher noticed what I was doing and showed me the pen knife on their key chain. Most classrooms had a letter opener, box cutter, or similar at the teachers desk. I think I found thirty knives before I gave up.
Students need knives and sharp objects to learn. Controlling access is fine but eliminating knives if a fools errand.
Does anyone know if this could be attacked as overly vague since it would encompass so many things that are regularly brought to and allowed on campus?
It's not difference than lock on your door, a drug addict see your front door unlock, they'll try to steal something, but they aren't gonna figure out how to pick a lock or break a window to cause a ruckus.
For schools in particular, it does not seem like a good use of funds to buy super expensive metal detectors when the intent is only to deter "common scenarios" instead of dedicated attackers. Or do you disagree?
saying as someone who went to a semi-private school run by nuns where pupils would get written up for running.
I go through a metal detector when I go into work.
I go through a metal detector when I enter a courthouse.
I go through a metal detector when I go into the Capitol.
None of these things detracts from the gravitas of those places, and none of them makes any of those places feel less safe.
Especially when the alternatives include impinging on fundamental rights or forcing kids to go through sometimes horrifying active shooter drills, I have a hard time understanding the objection to metal detectors.
then again i only ever went throu a metal detector at the airport; which neither detected my pocket knife nor the screwdriver in my bag, but the guards made a real fuss about that half-filled bottle of juice.
> Drake told reporters that "there was another location that was mentioned, but because of threat assessment by the suspect, too much security, they decided not to."
https://www.newsweek.com/covenant-school-shooter-audrey-hale...
Metal detectors are better at preventing situations like gang violence where rivals carry every day "just in case".
Experiences certainly vary: security checkpoints definitely make me feel less safe, whether or not they include metal detectors, so I avoid going into any place which has one.
I would go to some significant effort to avoid putting my child through that experience every schoolday. What a drag on one's educational experience that would be!
Ceramic knifes exists.
A bigger issue for schools, IME, is all the after-hours activities where students have access to the buildings, but there are no scanners being operated. It is easy to bring things in during those times and stash weapons in lockers or other areas. Similarly, it is easier to have an accomplice open a side door to let someone in without being detected during these off hours.
And even if there were scanners it’s pretty easy to hide a knife in football equipment or a tuba or something.
Also - metal detectors won't detect ceramic knives. So it's a security theatre anyway.
You're defending against angry teens who might decide on doing it because one day something pushed them over an emotional edge. In that case, just knowing there are security measures to overcome might be enough to make them never try in the first place. You're not defending against rational actor, you're defending against emotional actor and security theatre is effective against emotional actors.
> You're defending against angry teens who might decide on doing it because one day something pushed them over an emotional edge.
I thought these scanners were installed (at least originally) mainly because of stuff like gang violence. I'd think a gang member (in their way) would be more like a "rational actor."
Also you'd have to differentiate the "smuggling a weapon" from "stabbing." The weapon smuggling part might be rational, but the stabbing itself be emotional and irrational.
Just feels like one of those solutions only we could come up with without actually solving anything. The teen TSA after school special version except with more dead kids.
There are broadly two solutions (to that, not premeditated crimes): Help people to get better at that, and/or minimize situations where actions carried out in a moment can have terrible outcomes.
Sometimes, one will be much more effective or feasible than the other; often a combination can work.
I'm also not sure how many guns are ceramic.
none
there is at least one.
guns made entirely of plastic are also viable.
and there is no fully plastic gun, even polymer striker-fired guns have metal components (notably, barrel, slide)
please provide links
Don't these companies trial these things for months in parallel with other equipment while they hone the algorithms to see what failed?
(I'm not even being sarcastic, I often forget this).
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/31/us/teachers-guns-schools....