I can picture it now: you beseech your local Congressman, “please lift the age for buying an AR-15.”
After reminding the pleading parent about the Second Amendment, he casually notes that
“your child should be okay. Your school has a drone system. “
Before getting to the drone specifics, let me wander a bit, helps the blood pressure (maybe).
It is fairly common to hear somebody say, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
I’ve never quite understood that succinct dismissal of seemingly common sense regulation of guns. If in a school shooting, you could do a comparison of the death toll for guns versus knives, for example, wouldn’t there be a disparity?
Anyway, let’s ignore that math and move on to a comment about the profile of the school shooter. Many of them have been bullied at school, with the latter often doing little to rectify the situation. Equally typical are parents who are laid-back about their offspring’s household proximity to guns and/or ignorant about their son’s writings/social media posts.
Since we are not going to do anything about guns, attached as they are to our historical manhood, to our ability to act with lethality (the Secretary of War’s favorite term) we must conclude that it is generalized mental health or cultural issues which have dictated the death of so many kids.
Leaving aside our drug consumption, both legal and otherwise, as an indicator of overall ill health (the overdose death rate per population is ten times that of European countries) there are numerous other data points which support the thesis that we simply have a cultural acceptance of multiple other life-shortening negatives.
We murder way more people than the above developed nations, we die more frequently in car crashes, we are more likely to die from fires, and our death rate for kids is double. Our specific and unique acceptance of gun deaths being the leading cause of children expiring prematurely then fits; it’s not an anomaly. (An interjection: Honduras has four times the homicide rate as that of the USA, but reportedly no school shootings. When countries as diverse as Austria and Australia had horrible shootings in the past year, they were so unprecedented that legislative changes were in the works immediately.)
Even for Americans inured to violence, there is still something nagging in the brain when thinking about school shootings, you know – the standard default observation: “children are our future.”
Now, the ingenious mind of the American entrepreneur has come up with an approach to reducing those classroom attacks which deprive kids of their opportunity to dislike math.
Forget about previous ideas to help your child to stay calm in the classroom: “bullet-proof” backpacks or window film that purportedly would slow the speed of a bullet. An Austin, Texas company named Mithril Defense is now offering school security drones.
According to the “Wall Street Journal” of April 6, 2026 (edited for brevity), “the drones (piloted at headquarters) can screech, flash strobe lights, and shoot pepper gel to deter assailants in active shooter situations – while reaching attackers faster than police or school resource officers, although Mithril reserves the right to act independently. The cost is $8 per child per month.”
I’m speechless: we do virtually nothing about guns, nor kids being bullied, nor (until a recent court case) oblivious parents. Instead we accept that school shootings are inevitable at a rate far beyond that of any country which has the descriptor “civilized” attached to it.
Not to worry: the body count will be reduced by drones controlled by a private enterprise.
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