--- title: "Schools Deploying Pepper Spray Drones to Sic on Mass Shooters" description: "Schools across the country are turning to emplacing a mini-army of pepper-spray drones on campus to subdue school shooters." date: "2026-07-30" modified: "2026-07-30" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/schools-deploying-drones-mass-shooters" categories: - "Drones" - "Robotics" - "Robots and Machines" --- # Schools Deploying Pepper Spray Drones to Sic on Mass Shooters ![A color-treated picture of a Campus Guardian Angel drone.]() *Campus Guardian Angel / Futurism* How do we combat the scourge of school shootings? The distinctly cyberpunk gamble that some places of learning are taking: rapid response drones. Multiple schools across three states will soon have their own veritable platoons of pepper-spraying drones to hunt down active shooters, [*The Washington Post* reports](), waiting to spring into action the moment they're called on. Traveling at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour and capable of smashing through the windows, the so-called "Campus Guardian Angels" can reach a gunman within just fifteen seconds, the manufacturer Mithril Defense claims. In addition to blasting a shooter with pepper spray, they can also distract them with loud sirens and flashing lights, and even ram into them at high speeds. "Once I get the drones on you, you just can't escape them," Bill King, a Mithril cofounder and retired Navy SEAL, told *WaPo*. It remains a fringe solution, but seems to be picking up steam. The state of Florida last year allocated more than $557,000 to a pilot program to deploy the drones at three different high schools. Georgia recently approved its own $500,000 pilot to test Mithril's system at five public schools. And in Colorado, a new K-12 public charter school decided it would pay to use the drones on its own. The drones aren't autonomous and are instead remotely controlled by human operators at Mithril's headquarters in Austin, Texas. Somewhere between 30 and 90 of the drones will be placed throughout a school in storage boxes, which helps them arrive quickly at the scene. But the efficacy of the drone defense systems remains a big question mark — and hopefully we'll never have to know — as is whether these solutions distract from addressing the systemic causes of mass shootings, like weak gun control and poor mental health support services. Mithril has promised that its tech could help local law enforcement who respond to a shooting by locating the shooter and relaying critical information, but that would require a high degree of coordination in a hectic and dangerous environment. What if the drone operators target the wrong person, or cause law enforcement to mistake an innocent person for the shooter because the drones happen to be near them? Are these drone operators ready to make split-second decisions in a life or death situation for the people on the ground? "It's almost like where gaming and school safety collide," Curtis Lavarello, CEO of the School Safety Advocacy Council, told *WaPo*. "I have some really serious reservations about the deployment of drones in schools." It's not the only tech-inflected solution being adopted to combat mass shootings. There are already numerous startups offering AI-powered gun detection systems, but their performance has been dubious. One called Omnilert called the cops on an innocent 16-year-old after it [mistook his bag of Dorito chips for a weapon](), and is [being sued by a survivor of a Tennessee high school shooting]() after it failed to detect the handgun used by the shooter. **More on drones:** [*We're Admittedly Terrified That They’ve Now Invented Invisible Drones*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()