The injured teenage survivor of a January 2025 shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee high school recently sued the manufacturer of an “AI gun detection” system that failed to detect the handgun that left two dead, including the shooter.
According to the lawsuit, which was filed in Davidson County court last month, the security company Omnilert either knew or should have known that there were “significant operational limitations in its gun detection system that could result in detection failures during actual emergencies, including limitations based on camera placement, proximity of the weapon to camera sensors, camera angle, lighting, and weapon visibility.”
Omnilert cofounder Ara Bagdasarian declined Ars’ invitation to answer questions about the lawsuit. System Integrations, the other defendant in the case, which resold the Omnilert system, also did not respond to Ars’ request for comment.
It really comes down to the specifics of the technology and how it’s implemented. The system I worked on was astonishingly good. Even the local police of a particular installment wanted to do a test of the system (basically walk around with various guns of all different sizes) and they were stunned at how well it worked.
The funny thing was that we built the system to work 100% locally, and we even insisted on air-gapped networks (but wasn’t a requirement). The amount of people and companies who asked if we could connect the system to the internet for easier access was worrying. Whenever we tried to explain the basics of data security and the potential issues we were just looked at like we were nuts.
Yeah, cameras should almost always be on a segregated network, preferably with port-security. The NVR may need to connect to the Internet for updates - assuming one can’t just upload that via the UI - but that’s about it.