It would be nice to have better screening tools, but that doesn’t mean a company should get to lie about what their products are capable of and how they work.
Ironically, millimeter wave imagers, that are legitimately capable of finding hidden weapons pretty much anywhere, isn’t deployed outside airports because of the cost and the huge backlash that anything that has the resolution to accurately distinguish a gun can also image your private parts quite well. Evolv wants you to think they can have comparable accuracy with higher throughput and lower cost, but I’ll bet every airport in the country would have them if those claims were true. So instead Evolv preys on nervous leaders who want some protection in large public gatherings but aren’t knowledgeable about security.
Canadians have guns. Mexicans have guns. Australians have guns. They don't have school shootings on an almost daily basis. The problem is definitely not the guns. It doesn't help, but it's not the root cause.
I am happy to inform you that the United States also does not have school shootings on an "almost daily basis". Not trying to be pedantic here, but gross exaggerations misrepresent the issue.
There were 112 school shootings where someone was injured or killed this year.
I am happy to inform you that the United States also does not have school shootings on an "almost daily basis". Not trying to be pedantic here, but gross exaggerations misrepresent the issue.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/12/17/mass-s... > GVA has reported 971 cases of school shootings across the United States in 2024, with many of them having no victims or injuries. The database has tracked 112 school shootings in which a victim was injured or killed. Somewhere between ~3/day and ~0.3/day, depending what you count. Close enough.
Also keep in mind there’s something like 180 days per year of K-12 education in the US each year, so that’s something like 0.62 to 5.4 per school day.
It would be nice to have better screening tools, but that doesn’t mean a company should get to lie about what their products are capable of and how they work. Ironically, millimeter wave imagers, that are legitimately capable of finding hidden weapons pretty much anywhere, isn’t deployed outside airports because of the cost and the huge backlash that anything that has the resolution to accurately distinguish a gun ca…
> So instead Evolv preys on nervous leaders who want some protection in large public gatherings but aren’t knowledgeable about security.
That's certainly consistent with their email list. I have no idea how I got on it, but I was on it for a while about church security, and it was constant "webinar" reminders (I assume, sales pitch without having to actually interact with people one-on-one) about how you might have people "bringing guns into" your church without knowing it, etc.
It would have been interesting tech to play with. I figure that a quarter of the church on any given Sunday was carrying in some definition of "concealed" or another (ranging from "Dude, I can read the serial number on your gun through your shirt..." to "I'm certain there are people carrying that I would never expect to be carrying and will never know unless there's a reason it needs to come out").
I can't agree with this stance at all. US shootings and crimes will not be stopped or declined by stronger invasions of privacy and increased searches. US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net. Over and over and over again throughout history, harsher law enforcement…
Canadians have guns. Mexicans have guns. Australians have guns. They don't have school shootings on an almost daily basis. The problem is definitely not the guns. It doesn't help, but it's not the root cause.
Swiss also… everywhere. And the laws are not so different in the USA as the rest of the world as often portrayed. Also the violence all around the world is more uniform than many think or want to admit (if counted relative to people count) But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere while a shooting, say in Germany, will not be covered as much. Just in south germany (BW) there are a couple of people killed per week, but that is covered only occasionally, when at all, by very local newspapers.
I can't agree with this stance at all. US shootings and crimes will not be stopped or declined by stronger invasions of privacy and increased searches. US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net. Over and over and over again throughout history, harsher law enforcement…
>US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net.
Source? This doesn't pass the sniff test. First, US's poverty rate isn't the lowest, but is below many lower income countries that also have lower homicide rates. The figures for poverty rates take into account PPP, so it's not a matter of "Americans are richer in absolute dollars but poorer in relative dollars". Second, looking at the data, the correlation between income inequality is all over the place. For instance Malaysia is only marginally lower than the US in terms of income inequality, but is almost an order of magnitude lower in homicide rate. Trinidad and Tobago has even lower income inequality, but has almost an order of magnitude more.
Please don't go off into political flamewar tangents on articles on less political topics. We can talk about whether or not a technology is effective and how much manufacturers should be allowed to overstate claims without getting into unnecessary political strife that degrades HN.
> “The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun” lie has been repeatedly disproven over and over again Has it? They certainly don't stop themselves (unless resulting from being surrounded by good guys with guns).
Examples in both directions abound. Guns aren't required: https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/25/us/indiana-school-shooting-te... https://www.npr.org/2022/11/15/1136617873/buffalo-clinic-gun... https://time.com/6249944/monterey-park-mass-shooting-brandon... https://nypost.com/2022/02/01/waffle-house-shooting-video-sh... https://abcnews.go.com/US/abc-news-exclusive-teacher-hugged-... Guns (even nearly 400 of them, carried by…
You're trying to disprove the political slogan, which is obviously rhetoric. "The only way to X is Y" is generally going to be false because absolutist statements in general are going to be false.
The real question is, for example, does prohibiting school staff from having firearms make it better or worse? Which is pretty hard to measure when there is a federal law against it. But a point in favor of "better" is that senseless mass shootings tend to happen disproportionately in schools and other places where the shooter knows nobody else is allowed to be armed.
I can't agree with this stance at all. US shootings and crimes will not be stopped or declined by stronger invasions of privacy and increased searches. US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net. Over and over and over again throughout history, harsher law enforcement…
Blanket black-and-white statements about what will or won’t ‘solve’ gun violence can only exist in oversimplified worlds that conflate causes, catalysts, prerequisites, cultural influences, economics, etc. If anybody is expecting one sphere of concern— e.g socioeconomic equality, bans, mental health treatment, draconian sentences for violent crimes, etc.— to essentially resolve the issue to the exclusion of all others, then nothing will ever look like it’s going to work because it’s not one problem. It’s not even one symptom. Street gang violence, criminal cartel violence, and mass killings by extremists are serious problems with very different root causes that express themselves in very different ways. It’s also totally disingenuous to say their having a common tool is inconsequential, or that the same approach to addressing that makes sense everywhere, or that taking away the rights of people with different values is an inconsequential concern. You can’t solve all problems at once, and dismissing one approach out-of-hand because you can cite problems it won’t solve and assert all sorts of assumed negative effects without any evidence is nothing more than avoidance.