I certainly don’t agree. Perhaps in time a doorman would be faster, but it would take weeks or months for a doorman to learn hundreds or thousands of faces well enough to let them in with any realistic degree of confidence. And every semester or every year, the learning curve would have to be repeated dozens or hundreds of times. My highschool had 3500 students and I don’t know how many staff.
It would make sense for student to have a key card to get in, but someone could just conk a student outside over the head and take their card. I have no idea what the cost of some kind of biometric ID card would be, but I suspect perhaps prohibitive given the relatively high turnover of school populations.
That may very well be so. My main point is that by the time there is a technological solution to the problem of serious injuries and death caused by car crashes, there is also likely to be a technological solution to the problem of strangers entering schools to harm the students.
WTF are you talking about? If you’re talking about using a doorman to recognize every individual by memorizing their face, which is the only reasonable comparison to make against facial recognition software, then yes it would until the doorman recognized all the faces. There are other things doormen can do that would be faster, like just not letting in someone carrying an assault rifle or wearing body armor, or even taking a quick look at ID cards. OTOH, if you want the doorman to carefully examine all the cards and make sure the face on it matches the face of the carrier and the card hasn’t been tampered with, you get a different kind of slowdown.
I still cannot help the feeling that the de-socializing effects of pervasive car use/dependence factor as a direct link to gun violence. The your-box/my-box culture makes it oh so much easier to not care a whit about other people and to put emotional problems in the SEP file. Not addressing the social factors that foster alienation is a sure way to make the problem even worse.
I guess I’m still not being clear. At the elementary school level, the software doesn’t have to recognize all the children, it just has to keep out non-authorized adults. A doorman also needs to recognize the adults that are supposed to be there.
At the high school level it is a different problem, since the students could be the offender.
There is also an issue of scale. The average elementary school only has a few hundred pupils. High Schools can run into the thousands. I checked Orange County, Florida where I live and it has 135 elementary schools and less than two dozen high schools.
Of course when you are talking about terrorists and nutjobs, who just want to kill anybody, then it is harder. They will just look for a soft target. If you harden the elementary schools, then they will just attack playgrounds.
I’m not JoelUpchurch but what is not to understand of his answer to that question? His belief is a widely implemented facial recognition software solution would be cheaper than staffing every school with a full time doorman.
Of course the elementary and middle schools my kids have gone to (and I suspect pretty widely in place currently) already have people needing to ring the bell and get buzzed in after being (supposedly) recognized or approved by the office staff. In the High School there is a guard (not armed but big) at the door, checking student I.D.s before entry and who would prevent adult entry before they check in. Of course check in is merely signing a piece of paper, stating your business and destination in the building, and wearing a tag. A high security system it aint, though I suspect they are tighter this week than last month.
Cars are also a problem for the security of our children. A rampager has a much easier time carrying his weapons to a school, mall or other target site in a car than he would be able to on foot, bicycle or public transportation. But even beyond that, look how much easier it must be to abduct a child for depravity, just grab them at a playground, shove them in a car, bound and/or sedated, and take them to a less public location. Seems to me it takes a fair bit more guile to abduct a child without a car – I believe it can be done, just with much greater difficulty. (I have never been inclined toward any such act, so I am mostly guessing.)
Interesting thread. I’d like to stir in a few thoughts to see who I can piss off. SIAP.
there isn’t a constitutional right to own and operate a mechanized vehicle, which seemingly removes at least one hurdle to regulation.
while age (or lack of it) clearly coordinates to frequency and severity of auto accidents, age doesn’t cause such accidents. To address at least some of the causes, I’ve often wondered why drivers aren’t required to retake licensing exams periodically – say, once every 20 years – to force people to bone up on traffic laws and screen out those individuals who have lost the ability to safely operate a motor vehicle.
if the goal is to materially reduce the number of premature deaths among the unwitting, it does seem like guns are a curious place to start.