Taser Manufacturer Axon Goes Skynet On Schoolchildren

Even if the circumstances of the Uvalde shooting itself had been insufficient, the aftermath confirms it as a Deep State operation. While calls for moar ghun lawz are typical, some Swamp Creatures have been entirely too bold with the Narrative for it to have been unplanned.

Swamp Creatures such as Axon Corp. CEO Rick Smith, nursing a serious case of MIC envy.

Firm proposes Taser-armed drones to stop school shootings

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By Matt O’Brien and Michael Balsamo, 3 June 2022

Taser developer Axon said this week it is working to build drones armed with the electric stunning weapons that could fly in schools and “help prevent the next Uvalde, Sandy Hook, or Columbine.” But its own technology advisers quickly panned the idea as a dangerous fantasy.

From zero to Dilbert in one paragraph!

The publicly traded company, which sells Tasers and police body cameras, floated the idea of a new police drone product last year to its artificial intelligence ethics board, a group of well-respected experts in technology, policing and privacy.

 

Some of them expressed reservations about weaponizing drones in over-policed communities of color. But they were not expecting Axon’s Thursday announcement that it wants to send those Taser-equipped drones into classrooms to prevent mass shootings by immobilizing an intruding gunman.

 

In an interview with The Associated Press, Axon founder and CEO Rick Smith said he felt compelled to make the idea public after the mass shooting at an Uvalde, Texas elementary school, saying he was “catastrophically disappointed” in the response by police who didn’t move in to kill the suspect for more than an hour.

 

I feel like I’ve seen this movie before. Hmm… “Dick, I’m VERY disappointed” or something?

 

Axon’s stock price rose with the news. But the announcement angered members of the ethics board, some of whom are now likely to quit in protest.

I HAVE seen this movie before!

It was only a matter of time until the MIC started asking what it could do about the problem of school shooters. Other than, y’know, ending child genital mutilation and related psychosexual experiments in the absence of fathers.

“This particular idea is crackpot,” said Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor who sits on the Axon AI Ethics Board. “Drones can’t fly through closed doors. The physical properties of the universe still hold. So unless you have a drone in every single classroom in America, which seems insane, the idea just isn’t going to work.”

Dude, don’t say things like that to weapon manufacturers.

Friedman said it was a “dangerous and fantastical idea” that went far beyond the proposal for a Taser-equipped police drone that board members — some of them former or current police officials — had been debating in recent months.

 

“We begged the company not to do it,” Friedman said of the company’s announcement. “It was unnecessary and shameful.”

 

The product idea had been kicked around at Axon since at least 2019 and the company has been working to try to figure out whether a drone with a Taser was even a feasible idea. Over the last year, the company created computer-generated art renderings to mock up a product design and conducted an internal test to see if Taser darts — which transmit an immobilizing electric jolt — could be fired from a flying drone, Smith said. He added that he had discussed the possibility of developing such a product with the ethics board.

 

“And they said no but I went public anyway because…”

 

…he stressed Friday that no product had been launched and any potential launch would be down the road. The idea, he felt, needed to be shared now because of the public conversation about effective ways for police to safely confront attackers and how schools can increase safety.

Because sales. He’s manufacturing demand with which to override his own ethics board.

 

“This is an idea that should get into the public’s consciousness while our minds are open to it…” he said.

THAT

CROSSED

A

LINE.

Axon just went Skynet AND Clockwork Orange simultaneously.

Board members who spoke with The Associated Press said they were taken aback by the school drone proposal — which they got notice of only earlier this week — and cobbled together a unanimous statement of concern that described Axon’s decision as “deeply regrettable.” The company tweeted out the board’s dissent shortly after its own statement Thursday announcement.

 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were resignations,” said another ethics board member, Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington. “I think everyone on the board has to make a choice about whether they want to stay involved.”

 

Friedman and Calo both described this week’s process as a sharp turnaround from the respectful relationship that Axon executives have had with the board in recent years on controversial topics such as face recognition — which Axon decided against using in its body cameras — and automated license plate readers.

 

“Sometimes the company takes our advice and sometimes it doesn’t,” Friedman said. “What’s important is that happens after thoughtful discussion and coordination. That was thrown out the window here.”

 

Smith said the company is still in the very early phases of product development and would continue to consult the ethics board, along with law enforcement officials, community leaders and school officials. He acknowledged that the company might later determine that the idea isn’t feasible and abandon it.

The ethics board has been telling him No for over a year and he’s still pushing it. The Enforcement Droid program won’t be abandoned.

But he took issue with the idea that he had ignored the concerns from the ethics board, which is meant to provide guidance and share feedback. Ultimately, the decision still falls to Smith as the company’s chief executive.

 

“I have not ignored what they have said. People can have debates and disagree,” Smith said. “I think there is one thing the world can see: our [ethics] board is not a whitewash.”

 

“I hope they don’t resign,” he added.

The derp is over 9000!!!!

On Friday in an “Ask Me Anything” chat on the online forum Reddit. Smith acknowledged that “drones in schools can sound nuts” but went on to answer detailed questions about them. They could travel through school vents, he said, and perch on doors and walls near ceilings. It could be a “good thing” if a gunman tried to shoot one down because it would distract from trying to kill people.

 

“We’re doing this because we care,” Smith said. “We’re a business so ultimately we have to find a financial model that works, but at the end of the day we’ve been successful because… we solve problems we care about,” he added.

The only ways that could sound worse is…

Smith told a Reddit user that Axon was “absolutely not” trying to capitalize on recent tragedies to attract investors.

…baldfaced lying to 4chan, which TOTALLY won’t come back on him…

He noted the advisory board’s disagreements but said the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas — and what he described as misguided proposals to arm teachers with guns — compelled him to go public with the drone idea to field a “far broader array of voices.”

…and wanting to arm drones because the alternative is arming humans.

Hello, Skynet. Imagine your children playing in a school playground, patrolled overhead by taser-equipped drones ready to “incapacitate” any of them who behaving in a threatening manner.

In fact, don’t imagine. Smith wrote a graphic novel about it.

h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/taser-maker-axon-proposes-shock-234035489.html

“I am done waiting for politicians to solve the problem. So we’re going to solve it,” Smith said. “We’re going to do this.”

 

Smith has promoted the idea for years, even including it in a graphic novel, “The End of Killing,” that shows a drone zapping a gunman rampaging through a day-care center. And in a question-and-answer session on Reddit the day after the announcement, Smith said that he knows the idea might “sound nuts” but that it offers some benefits over “today’s solution” for responding to shootings: “a local person with a gun.”

 

The shock drones, he said, would be installed in ceiling-mounted “launch stations,” like smoke detectors, and be shielded to prevent “kids throwing stuff at” them. Schools, he said, could install “simple, low-cost vents” above doors to allow the drones to fly into locked rooms, though he also acknowledged that idea could raise “some fire code issues” related to smoke ventilation.

 

The drones could fire a payload of up to four shock probes more than 40 feet, he said, and deliver a sustained current of electricity to incapacitate an attacker long enough for people nearby to kill them or take their gun. The drones would be small and hard to shoot at, he wrote, and “after running out of darts, we could ram the drone into someone to physically distract” them.

Here’s a link to that “End of Killing” graphic novel. I post two pictures of it here: one is that just-described system taking out a child at a school, and the next, just a couple pages later, is the same system taking out a jihadist in Syria. Smith intended from the beginning for this drone to be dual-use, just like ED-209.

How could this system NOT be designed to pacify a target population?

Schools or police agencies, he said, would pay an estimated fee of about $1,000 a year per drone, and the company would sell them only in markets where “they would not be used abusively.”

Fuck drones, this guy figured out how to predict the future! Oops, no, he’s just straight-up lying to us and not caring if we notice. What’s the truth, then?

“Once we get the bugs worked out on a captive civilian population, we can resell the system to the military where the real money is to be made.” Signed, Dick Jones of Omni Consumer Products.

The Federal Aviation Administration in 2018 banned anyone from flying a drone with a dangerous weapon attached. But Smith said such “legal limitations” could be resolved over time; Taser weapons and body cameras, he noted, had also been illegal in some states before Axon had started marketing them.

Laws are only for little people!

In the Reddit session, Smith was asked how he would handle pushback from parents not wanting flying shock machines near their children. “Many parents would likely find this situation more comfortable than an armed guard stationed at the school,” he said.

Not including the parents he was talking to, apparently, but haters gonna hate.

…The response on Reddit was scalding. Some commenters worried that the drones would be misused to punish students, break up fights or police protests, or that they would lead to unintended consequences, such as more people getting shot after the gunman was shocked.

My thoughts exactly. School authorities aren’t going to buy this system and then not use it until they’re forced to. Not when total control of their psychosexual-experiment subjects is so tantalizingly close.

And not when the drone maker needs test data to gain the Pentagon’s approval.

Wrote [one participant], “We sure do love addressing symptoms instead of root causes don’t we.”

Word.