A student walked outside his high school in Baltimore County holding a bag of chips. The AI system watching the cameras decided it was a gun.
Police arrived. Officers drew their service weapons on a group of teenagers, detained a 16 year old, handcuffed him, and searched him. There was no gun. There was a crumpled snack bag. A county councilman said afterward what everyone was thinking: how did we get to a place where officers approached a child with guns drawn because of a bag of chips?
Now hold that image, because I need to show you the other half.
On January 22, 2025, a 17 year old opened fire in the cafeteria at Antioch High School in Nashville. He killed Josselin Dayana Corea Escalante, who was 16. He grazed another student, Antonyous Henin, who was 17. Then he took his own life.
Antioch High School had no traditional metal detectors. What it had was an AI gun detection system running on the school's cameras, purchased under a contract the district approved in 2023 for more than $1 million.
The system was on. It was working. It did not see the gun.
It did activate a short time later, when armed police officers ran into the building to respond. The technology detected the guns of the people arriving to help, and missed the gun of the child who came to kill.
In May, the student who was wounded filed suit in Davidson County Circuit Court against the company that made the system and the contractor that installed it. The complaint alleges the product was marketed with claims it could not support, including language about unparalleled reliability and about detecting a weapon before a shot is fired.
And then there is the allegation that stopped me cold when I read it. According to the complaint, the company's marketing claimed its technology could have mitigated or prevented the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
That is my son's school. That is the day Alex was murdered, used as a sales line.
I want to be careful and fair here, because these are allegations and the case has not been decided. The company's chief executive has said publicly that the weapon was not visible from the camera's position, and that this was not a case of the system failing to recognize a firearm. He has also acknowledged that the system does not work perfectly all the time. The district's director said no system is going to catch 100 percent of what a person is carrying. Those statements are probably all true.
But notice what they mean. If the honest description of the product is that it works when the weapon is clearly visible to a camera at the right angle, then it is not what was sold. Nobody spends a million dollars on a system that finds guns that were already easy to see.
Here is the thing I wish every school board in America understood before they sign.
Detection technology, even when it works flawlessly, operates in the last few seconds of a process that has been running for months. The weapon at the door is the final step. By the time a camera has anything to look at, we have already missed every earlier chance.
I wrote in this newsletter recently about the ADL's timelines tracing the online lives of two teenagers before they became school shooters. One of those two was the young man who walked into the Antioch cafeteria. His path was documented for months across gore sites and extremist forums, in plain sight, on a device.
So think about the sequence honestly. For months, there was a visible trail. On the morning of January 22, there was a camera. The trail cost nothing to see and nobody was looking. The camera cost more than $1 million and could not see.
There are two bills for this, and districts only ever see the first one.
The first is money, and it is money that does not go to a threat assessment coordinator, a counselor, or a school psychologist. Every district budget is finite. A million dollars spent watching hallways is a million dollars not spent on the people who could have noticed a kid falling apart in October.
The second bill is paid by children. A false positive is not a harmless glitch. It is a 16 year old on the ground in handcuffs with guns pointed at him, and it happened over snack food. Multiply that across a school year and you get more searches, more discipline, more police contact, and a generation of students learning that the building treats them as suspects. We are trying to build schools where a frightened kid tells an adult what he saw. Handcuffing his classmate over a bag of chips is not how that trust gets built.
And there is a third cost, quieter than both. A district that has bought the expensive system believes it is protected. That belief is the most dangerous product on the market.
I am not against technology in schools. I have spent 8 years pushing for better tools, and some of them save lives. Cameras help responders. Access control matters. Anonymous reporting apps work.
What I am against is buying a product in the aftermath of a tragedy, in a hurry, on the strength of a marketing claim nobody stress tested, and then calling the job done. Every dollar in school safety competes with every other dollar. The question is never whether a tool does something. It is whether this tool, at this price, prevents more harm than the counselor or the threat assessment team we did not hire instead.
If your district is buying or renewing detection technology, ask for three things in writing before the vote. One: the documented conditions under which it fails, including camera angle, lighting, obstruction, and concealment. Two: the false positive rate in a real school, not a lab, and exactly what happens to a student when it fires. Three: what else that money could fund, priced out side by side, in counselors, threat assessment training, or reporting systems. If a vendor will not put the first two in writing, that is your answer.
Josselin was 16. She should be starting her senior year. No camera was ever going to save her in the 4 seconds it had. The months before that were where she could have been saved, and those months are still where we are not looking.
For Alex. And for all of them.
Max Schachter
Claims described from the lawsuit are allegations that have not been proven in court, and the companies' public responses are included above. Per our No Notoriety commitment, the perpetrator is not named. Josselin Corea Escalante is. Learn more about school safety at schoolsafetydashboard.org.