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Suggestions for Physical Anti-Vegas-Shooting Countermeasures
Lasers, grenade drones and more
As designers, we naturally try to think of what systems could be devised to prevent tragedies like the mass shooting in Vegas. Realistically it would require a cocktail of procedures well beyond the scope of mere design, but let's go through some ideas here, some supplied by readers, as a mental exercise.
We'll use the exact attack scenario conducted by mass murderer Stephen Paddock, which was terrifying in its meticulous preparation. Here are the relevant facts of the attack as we know them, for which we'll try to brainstorm some physical countermeasures:
- Paddock was firing on a crowd of 22,000 people who were largely in the open
- He fired from a range of about 1,200 feet and an elevation of 32 stories
Image by Wall Street Journal - He fired from two different locations approximately 30 feet apart within a sprawling hotel suite and an adjoining room he also rented
Image by New York Times 
Enter a caption (optional)- He had amassed a total of 23 firearms on-site, including 12 assault rifles convered to automatic fire using bump stocks
- He was equipped with an oven-mitt-like glove used to grab overheated gun barrels so that he could quickly swap rifles
- He fired for approximately ten minutes
- He had cameras set up, nanny-cam-style, to monitor the hallway
- When a security guard approached his room, Paddock was aware and fired 200 rounds into the hallway
Potential Solutions
As reader Nathan Guice pointed out, "It may be impossible to prevent this sort of attack. I'm afraid we may only be able to develop means of responding rather than prevention." Let's go with that assumption and figure out some response measures.
Detection/Location
First up: How to determine where the gunfire is coming from? As Guice pointed out, "There are systems already out there like ShotSpotter that can pinpoint the shooter."
Enter a caption (optional)Already in use by the NYPD and some 90 other cities, ShotSpotter is a system of acoustic sensors that are deployed around hotspots and uses triangulation to isolate the location of gunfire.
Enter a caption (optional)The algorithms do their thing fairly quickly: It takes about 45 seconds from the sound of the first gunshot until police have a blinking red dot on a map.
Enter a caption (optional)I've gone through ShotSpotter's FAQ and it's not clear if the system works in three dimensions, i.e. while the system provides longitude and latitude, I don't know if it can provide precise altitude. Another potential issue is how to deploy them in festival situations/cities without ShotSpotter infrastructure already in place. About 15 to 20 sensors are required to cover a square mile. Lastly, would they need to be camouflaged or guarded to prevent tampering prior to an attack?
Enter a caption (optional)As for detecting gunfire from a weapon using a suppressor, ShotSpotter writes: "We believe we will have various options ranging from increasing our sensor array density to developing software/firmware to address the detection of suppressed gunfire if it were to become a widespread issue."
Neutralization
Another reader who did not provide his/her name takes the ShotSpotter idea further, proposing a "sound triangulating laser system which targets the source of the gunfire. It could serve to blind the assailant and also let the crowd know where the threat is."
Enter a caption (optional)This sounds like a great idea too; we know that simple laser pointers can be used to temporarily blind pilots, so beefier ones might potentially be very effective. Paddock was firing from two different locations, so we would need enough of these laser devices to cover a certain amount of ground, and some means of guiding them with pinpoint accuracy.
Enter a caption (optional)The same reader also alternatively suggested conventional "spotlights [that blast] a million [candlepower] in the face of the assaulter," but the pinpoint nature of lasers sound better to me as they alert everyone around to the precise location of the danger.
Enter a caption (optional)I like the idea of taking away an assailant's vision, because the simple fact is that he can't shoot what he can't see. While he could still blindly fire outside of the window at the sizeable crowd, if his vision was disabled it might at least impair his ability to reload/switch rifles.
Enter a caption (optional)Elimination
Temporarily blinding Paddock might cause him to simply abandon his original target; perhaps he would have gone down to the casino floor to continue his killing spree. In order to incapacitate him, the obvious solution, as Guice pointed out, would be a human sniper/spotter team, assuming they could use some type of ammunition that would not pass through Paddock and into the suites behind him.
However, I've got an idea that's a little on the crazy side. Another reader, who did not provide his/her name, suggested police drones that could incapacitate an assailant using unspecified means. Here's my suggestion for that:
When soldiers or police teams are clearing a room, they'll toss a flashbang/stun grenade inside first. This produces a blinding light and a bang in excess of 170 decibels in order to stun the occupants.
Enter a caption (optional)But since Paddock had cameras in the hall, he would've seen them coming.
So what if we equipped some sacrificial, camera-equipped quadrotor drones, each with one flashbang grenade attached, and flew them right into Paddock's open windows?
Enter a caption (optional)
Enter a caption (optional)If flown towards his windows from directly above or below they'd be hard to spot and shoot, and if we sent multiple drones in, I'd have to think at least one could make it inside and somehow activate its grenade.
Responding police officers reportedly reached Paddock's suite just 12 minutes after he started firing. They then had to spend nearly an hour clearing the entire floor before breaching his room, for safety's sake. But if they had visual confirmation that the shooter was incapacitated and that there was no one else in the suite, perhaps they could have entered immediately.
Enter a caption (optional)While that point may be moot--it is thought that Paddock killed himself right after his ten minutes of shooting--if a flashbang drone could've been flown into his suite just minutes after he started firing, perhaps his spree could've been cut short and more casualties prevented.
If you've got more ideas, please let us know! In particular, the problem of how some were injured in the stampede is a difficult one to solve.
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Comments
As seen from abroad, this American psycho-drama about fire weapons is ridicolous and wild, as it is this attempt to design countermeasures for a risk that could be highly reduced with simple actions.
What would you need to do in order to obtain this license?
Have a medical (mostly mental) check, have an immaculate criminal record, prove you can manage the device, prove you know the regulations, apply for a yearly renewal. Pay taxes on it.
It's easier that maintaining a flying licence. It's similar to what is common in most countries including mine.
Almost
everything you just suggested is already applied in California. California is home to some of the worst examples of these mass
shootings in recent years. California has something called a firearms
safety certificate. It’s a written test which shows you know the basics
of safe gun handling and storage. There is also a background check which
looks at your criminal record. Any
felony (serious crime) gets you rejected. There are only two differences.
The license is not obtained yearly, and it does not require a psychological
screening. (The background check does, however, check to see if you were
ever committed to a mental health facility.)
Let's talk about those
two differences: So let's say somehow the tax on
this license is enough to cover the costs for an army of tens of thousands of
state paid psychologists (along with the associated bureaucracy) to evaluate every single person
who wants to own a gun. (This would make the license exorbitantly expensive). Let's say
that the psychologists are really competent and they all care about what they
are doing (a stretch for such a large pool of individuals). The truth is
that mental illness can be very difficult to pin down. A lot of these
mass shooters seem normal until they snap. Or at least they don't seem
like they are going to kill a bunch of people. These psychologists really
wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at diagnosing “mass shooter tendencies”. This is not Minority Report. There is no pre-crime crystal ball that will
tell you what someone will do. Not to
mention that our Supreme Court would tear this system down within a year or two
because it would be unconstitutional here.
The solution you have really
proposed is to tax and regulate guns out of existence. This is a common approach from anti-gun
legislators in the U.S. It’s really a
non-solution because it does not address the root of the violence. What the U.S needs to be doing now is asking
itself what it did right over the last few decades to bring gun crime down in
the midst of a record level guns in our society. I remain convinced that our problem is more
of a cultural one, and it needs to be addressed on that level to have lasting
and meaningful effect.
How about, I dunno...gun control? Design better infrastructure that monitors individuals buying firearms/ammo so flags go up when buying/possessing too much at a time?
As asport shooter, I have approximately 5000 rounds of ammunition (various calibers) in my house right now. I use about 1000 rounds of ammunition every time I go to the range. Would you say I have too much ammunition?
That is another often unpublicized fact, that gun violence has actually been declining. I believe our earlier lack of media awareness has blinded us to the fact that more people died of gun violence in preceding decades, but that we simply did not know of the high earlier numbers as there was no Twitter nor internet.
That being said, I want what I believe most other Americans want: To find a way to keep powerful weapons out of the hands of malevolent maniacs.
The fact that you have gun crime is already bad, most other countries don't even have to deal with it, lots of police have died in the USA due to this.
JC- If by "suits modern society" you mean giving government a monopoly on the use of lethal force...no...that is not what history has taught me is a wise thing to do. America is about checks and balances of power. An armed citizenry keeps the government from becoming too authoritarian. If you look around "modern society" you can find all sorts of examples of governments wielding despotic force over their own citizens....Even in so-called democracies. The 2nd amendment is about the democratization of force...and it is right.
Jeff, my (admittedly unpopular) position is that there are too many law-abiding citizens who own powerful weapons and yet have no inclination to harm others that the term of "gun control" is too broad to gain any kind of meaningful traction. This is anecdotal, but I personally know several individuals who own what could be defined as a perverse number of firearms because they are object geeks, not mass murderers. I agree with the need for mental screening, but I am not convinced that volume buying of either guns or ammunition is a reliable red flag. In order for me to embrace your viewpoint, I'd need to see hard numbers on the proportion of people that own weapons versus the number of people that use them to commit heinous acts.
I think making a connected database would have been helpful.