This is another story that broke before the Evergreen High shooting, but I’m just getting to it now. It’s about NASRO, the National Association of School Resource Officers, and its annual conference. If you’ve never heard of NASRO, it’s basically the professional association for cops assigned to schools. They provide training on everything from trauma-informed policing to tactical response. That all sounds fine, but what really jumps out about this year’s conference is what else was on display.

From NPR’s report on the conference, walking into the expo hall feels less like an education conference and more like a gun show with a fresh coat of paint. Panic buttons. Bullet-resistant whiteboards. Facial recognition systems. Body armor. Tasers. Trauma kits packed with tourniquets and clotting agents. Even drones designed to pepper-spray a shooter. If that lineup doesn’t sound like the makings of a dystopian theme park, I don’t know what does. And we should be honest about how sad it is that in America, we now have what amounts to a school shooting convention.

One of the few honest moments came from a rep at a metal detector company, who admitted schools are now their majority customers and said flat out that it “isn’t right.” He’s correct. Because no matter how many gadgets line the walls or how many contracts get signed, this is all still security theater. No amount of money poured into gimmicks and gizmos will ever guarantee the safety of a school.

The truth is, many of these companies are circling for government handouts, just like we’ve seen before. The sales pitch is always the same: “If it saves just one life, how can you say no?” And school districts, terrified of being the next headline, throw cash at the problem, even if the solutions don’t actually work in practice.

Contrast that with what actual research shows makes a difference. The Violence Prevention Project Research Center at Hamline University has interviewed would-be school shooters who backed out. Two things stopped them: they couldn’t get their hands on a gun, or someone reached out and gave them a reason to hope. That’s it. Not drones. Not apps. Not AI. Gun access and human connection.

That’s where the billions of dollars we’re spending should be going: into safe storage laws, into counselors, and into building communities where kids don’t fall through the cracks. Instead, we’re watching tech bros and defense contractors roll out cockamamie sci-fi experiments that don’t touch the root causes of the problem. We don’t need more gadgets. We need the courage to deal with guns and the will to invest in people. Until that happens, NASRO’s expo will keep humming, and the cycle will keep repeating.

And that’s the real thread tying it all together. Whether it’s AI cameras, pepper-ball drones, or crisis-reporting apps, these are all just different faces of the same school security theater. A billion-dollar industry selling illusions of safety, while the real solutions remain ignored.

(Source)

• The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing