Florida Schools Buy Drones, Ignore the Guns

Florida has officially joined the drone-as-school-safety circus, and if you squint hard enough, it still doesn’t look like progress. Three school districts, Broward, Leon, and Volusia, are now the proud testing grounds for Campus Guardian Angel, the Texas startup selling the idea that pepper-ball-shooting drones operated from a command center 1,200 miles away can stop an active shooter before first responders arrive.

That’s right. Austin-based drone pilots will be remotely “intercepting” hypothetical Florida school shooters. What could possibly go wrong?

According to Florida’s Commissioner of Education, the state is a “national leader” in school safety because it’s pouring public money into high-tech gadgets instead of dealing with the one factor school shooters consistently share: access to firearms. Florida, like Texas, has some of the loosest gun laws in the country, and the state legislature likes it that way. But why tighten background checks or promote secure storage when you can fund a fleet of drones that may or may not crash into a wall during a real emergency?

The sales pitch is slick. The drones supposedly launch within seconds. They distract, disorient, and maybe even physically stop a shooter. They buy “crucial time.” But all of this hinges on a flawless chain of events, perfect detection, perfect dispatch, perfect piloting, and perfect accuracy, all during a real shooting where adrenaline, chaos, and human unpredictability are doing their usual job of shredding every theory anyone ever put on a whiteboard.

These demos always look great. A dummy propped up in a hallway. A pilot who knows exactly when to strike. A camera that never grabs the wrong silhouette. No screaming kids. No overturned desks. No smoke. No blood. Just a sanitized bottle episode where everything behaves exactly as the tech bros want it to.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the last time a hyped school-security gadget promised to change everything, it mistook a bag of Doritos for a handgun and sent armed police straight toward a Black teenager who wasn’t doing anything except minding his business. But sure, let’s take the same general concept of AI-based threat detection, wire it to drones, and sprinkle in some remote piloting from another state.

Let’s not forget who’s paying for this. Florida didn’t just sign up for this. It became the first state to approve taxpayer funding for the program. The same lawmakers who claim “there’s no money” for mental-health services, teacher salaries, or fixing crumbling school buildings somehow found the budget for robot sky cops.

So, what happens if the technology fails? Or if a false alarm sends a drone barreling into a teenager at 60 miles per hour? What if pepper rounds hit an innocent student? What if the software misidentifies another everyday object as a gun? What happens when a shooter simply moves out of the drone’s line of fire? Don’t worry. There will be another press conference. Another promise. Another round of “lessons learned.” And probably another fat government contract.

What never changes is the core problem. School shootings keep happening because kids keep getting access to guns. Legally purchased guns. Unsecured guns. Guns left in nightstands and glove boxes and closets. Guns that lawmakers refuse to regulate in any meaningful way because the political cost is too high. So instead of confronting reality, they throw money at distractions like AI, cameras, apps, panic buttons, and now drones.

Florida isn’t investing in safety. It’s investing in spectacle.

These drones won’t stop the next Parkland. They won’t stop the next Uvalde-style failure. They won’t stop the next student who walks into school carrying a parent’s unsecured AR-15. However, they will give officials something shiny to show voters. Something to point at during press conferences. Something to distract from the very policies that created this crisis in the first place.

At the end of the day, a drone is just another gadget in a long line of expensive toys dressed up as solutions. And like every toy, it breaks the moment you expect it to do the job of a grown-up.

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