Dystopia watch: American schools are installing anti-shooter smoke cannons and bulletproof doors

America has a gun problem: the proliferation of guns in American homes has led to a largely silent epidemic of accidental shootings, intimate partner murders, and suicides.

While the sky-high fatalities from these everyday shootings are personal, quiet tragedies, the extremely public tragedies of mass shootings are both statistical outliers and rallying points for sensible gun policies in line with the rest of the world.

As welcome as the attention from high-profile atrocities is, there is danger that they will shift our focus to the extremely low likelihood that you will be shot by a deranged stranger in a public place and away from the much higher likelihood that someone you know (possibly you, yourself) will shoot you in your home.

One way this manifests is in an emphasis on "protecting" schools from mass shootings. At first, this was a minor hustle, with some petty grifters picking up small-money contracts designing "active shooter lockdown drills" for schools.

But after the Parkland shooting, the gun lobby and its purchased lawmakers came up with a new talking point: the solution to gun violence was to flood our schools with heavily armed mercenaries (or, worse yet, teachers!) who would execute would-be shooters. This strategy could be backstopped by buying all kinds of "anti-shooter" fixes, like bulletproof doors, bulletproof coffins that children could cower inside of, and Batman utility-belt gadgets like smoke cannons that could flood a school with choking, blinding clouds as a countermeasure against shooters.

This was a evilly brilliant move: by creating a "solution" that was tied to high-ticket procurements, the gun lobby created a self-perpetuating lobby machine for tooling up the schools of America -- hucksters who would divert some of their profits to pressuring governments to diverting more education dollars to weapons and armor, generating new profits and thus new lobbying dollars -- lather, rinse, repeat. Read the rest