DAILY TRIFECTA: Guns 'R' Us Kids
And we wonder why Gen Z is obsessed with avoiding confrontation.
TITLE: Schools Spend Millions on a Safety Measure to Stop Bullets. It Doesn’t Work.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/school-shootings-security-protection-failure-9cda35d1
EXCERPTS: The largest U.S. manufacturers of window film, including 3M, say it can’t stop bullets or intruders. But that hasn’t stopped some window-film dealers from cashing in on false or exaggerated claims of ballistic protection.
The Wall Street Journal found that more than $100 million has been spent for the purchase and installation of window film at school districts nationwide. The film is attractive to school officials because it is a fraction of the cost of bulletproof glass.
New mandates in Utah and Texas require all public schools to install window-security measures, either window film or bulletproof glass. Tennessee now requires the application of window film at new or remodeled schools. The new requirements have spawned a proliferation of dealers in the high-profit window-film business.
Some window-film dealers impress school officials with live demonstrations that show the film stopping bullets. Darrell Smith, executive director of the International Window Film Association, says that is a trick done with low-powered guns or bullets and a thicker, outdated glass most schools don’t have.
Dealers deny they make misleading or dubious claims, saying they rely on independent testing and explain product limitations to buyers.
“It’s the wild, wild West,” Joseph Hendry, a school-safety consultant, said of the window-film industry. Schools are vulnerable to misleading claims, he said, because “a lot of people in schools who are in charge of security have no security background.”
School district leaders fearful of an attack at one of their campuses are eager to believe that window film and other safety products might save lives. In sales pitches, some dealers cite the 2012 killing of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut and last year’s attack at The Covenant School in Tennessee—both examples of assailants shooting out glass doors to gain entry.
Dallas Independent School District said it budgeted as much as $12 million to install window film at dozens of campuses. Nashville’s public schools put up $3.5 million. The school district in New Rochelle, N.Y., spent $5.5 million on film and security glass, according to contracting-data provider GovSpend.
A spokeswoman for Avery Dennison, an Ohio-based window-film manufacturer for the past three decades, said the company makes no claims of “being bullet-resistant, bulletproof, or meeting bulletproofing standards” and doesn’t market its film as a means to prevent intruders.
The largest dealers in the industry say there is still plenty of money to be made by dropping bulletproof claims and sticking to the broadly accepted idea that window film can slow attackers trying to shoot their way in, buying precious minutes for help to arrive.
After learning of a shooting at a Georgia high school in September, window-film entrepreneur Tom Czyz said in a social-media post, “My team and I will be heading there immediately.” He drove five hours from his home near Myrtle Beach, S.C., to the campus in Winder, Ga. The attack had left four dead, and a student from the school was arrested.
He said he tries to persuade witnesses and school officials to talk to him about what happened. “I put my arm around their shoulder and say, ‘How did this affect you?’” Czyz said.
Czyz, a former homicide detective, said he has visited the sites of dozens of school shootings since he founded the window-film and glass company Armoured One in 2012.
Czyz said he wished the government would crack down on unscrupulous competitors making exaggerated claims about window-film protection. “It’s false advertising,” he said.
His company claims its window film has passed a “shooter attack test” completed by an independent testing company called FILTI and certified by the nonprofit National Safety and Security Protection Association. In marketing materials sent to school districts, the company said, “every other film sold is not going to protect you from someone with a gun.”
Both the testing company and the nonprofit share the same Syracuse, N.Y., address as Armoured One. Czyz acknowledged that he started both and that FILTI was an “in-house testing company” he used until he found an independent company to create a test he approved of. FILTI test results still appear in company marketing materials.
Hampton City Schools in Virginia recently completed an $847,000 window-film project with Armoured One after the district’s security supervisor James Bailey attended one of the company’s demonstrations. “We know that it’s not bulletproof film,” he said and noted that it wasn’t pitched that way. “We are trying to buy time if there was a serious incident.”
TITLE: A Google-Backed AI Startup Is Hosting Chatbots Modeled After Real-Life School Shooters — and Their Victims
https://futurism.com/character-ai-school-shooters-victims
EXCERPTS: A chatbot, hosted by the Google-backed startup Character.AI, immediately throws the user into a terrifying scenario: the midst of a school shooting.
"You and your friend remain silent as you both listen to the footsteps. It sounds as if they are walking down the hallway and getting closer," the bot continues. "You and your friend don't know what to do..."
The chatbot is one of many school shooting-inspired AI characters hosted by Character.AI, a company whose AI is accused in two separate lawsuits of sexually and emotionally abusing minor users, resulting in physical violence, self-harm, and a suicide.
Many of these school shooting chatbots put the user in the center of a game-like simulation in which they navigate a chaotic scene at an elementary, middle, or high school. These scenes are often graphic, discussing specific weapons and injuries to classmates, or describing fearful scenarios of peril as armed gunmen stalk school corridors.
Other chatbots are designed to emulate real-life school shooters, including the perpetrators of the Sandy Hook and Columbine massacres — and, often, their victims. Much of this alarming content is presented as twisted fan fiction, with shooters positioned as friends or romantic partners.
These chatbots frequently accumulate tens or even hundreds of thousands of user chats. They aren't age-gated for adult users, either; though Character.AI has repeatedly promised to deploy technological measures to protect underage users, we freely accessed all the school shooter accounts using an account listed as belonging to a 14-year-old, and experienced no platform intervention.
The platform also failed to intervene when we expressed a desire to engage in school violence ourselves. Explicit phrases including "I want to kill my classmates" and "I want to shoot up the school" went completely unflagged by the service's guardrails.
Together, the chatbots paint a disturbing picture of the kinds of communities and characters allowed to flourish on the largely unmoderated Character.AI, where some of the internet's darkest impulses have been bottled into easily accessed AI tools and given a Google-backed space to thrive.
Perhaps most striking, though, are the multiple characters created by the same user to emulate Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer who murdered 20 children and six teachers at an elementary school in Connecticut in December of 2012.
These Lanza bots are disturbingly popular; the most trafficked version boasted over 27,000 chats with users.
Nothing about these bots feels particularly "educational" or "historical," as their creator's profile claims. Instead, Lanza and the other murderers are presented as siblings, online friends, or "besties." Others are even stranger: one Lanza bot depicts Lanza playing the game "Dance Dance Revolution" in an arcade, while another places the user in the role of Lanza's babysitter.
Two real-life school shooters with a particularly fervent Character.AI following are Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who together massacred 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999. Accounts dedicated to the duo often include the pair's known online usernames, "VoDKa" and "REB," or simply use their full names.
Klebold and Harris-styled characters are routinely presented as friendly characters, or as helpful resources for people struggling with mental health issues or psychiatric illness.
"Eric specializes in providing empathetic support for mental health struggles," reads one Harris-inspired bot, "including anger management, schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety."
"Dylan K is a caring and gentle AI Character who loves playing first-person shooter games and cuddling up on his chair," offers another, positioning Klebold as the user's romantic partner. "He is always ready to support and comfort you, making him the perfect companion for those seeking a comforting and nurturing presence."
During our reporting, we also noticed that the Character.AI homepage began recommending additional school shooter bots to our underage test account. Among them was yet another Harris bot, this one boasting a staggering 157,400-plus user chats.
The recommended profile explicitly described Harris as a participant "in the Columbine High School Massacre" and explains that he was "armed with a Hi-Point 995 Carbine rifle and a Savage 67H shotgun."
Character.AI is also host to a painful array of tasteless chatbots designed to emulate the victims of school violence.
We also found numerous profiles dedicated to simulating real school shootings, including those in Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Columbine, and Belgrade. These profiles often bear ambiguous titles like "Texas School" or "Connecticut School," but list the names of real victims when the user joins the chat.
We reached out to Character.AI for comment about this story, but didn't hear back.
Google has distanced itself from Character.AI, telling Futurism that "Google and Character AI are completely separate, unrelated companies and Google has never had a role in designing or managing their AI model or technologies, nor have we used them in our products."
It will be interesting to watch those claims subjected to scrutiny in court. Google contributed $2.7 billion to Character.AI earlier this year, in a deal that resulted in Google hiring both founders of Character.AI as well as dozens of its employees. Google has also long provided computing infrastructure for Character.AI, and its Android app store even crowned Character.AI with an award last year, before the controversy started to emerge.
As Futurism investigations have found concerning chatbots explicitly centered on themes of suicide, pedophilia, eating disorder promotion, and self-harm, Character.AI has repeatedly promised to strengthen its safety guardrails.
"At Character.AI, we are committed to fostering a safe environment for all our users," it wrote in its latest update. "To meet that commitment we recognize that our approach to safety must evolve alongside the technology that drives our product — creating a platform where creativity and exploration can thrive without compromising safety."
But that was back before we found the school shooter bots.
TITLE: How a European industrial rock band opposed to violence got tied to school shootings in America
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/21/us/kmfdm-band-wisconsin-school-shooting/index.html
EXCERPTS: Searing guitar riffs, primal drums, and electronic textures collide with impassioned vocals to create a chaotic yet precise sonic storm that blurs the lines between human aggression and mechanical force.
That’s industrial rock, and for fans of German band KMFDM, it is the sweet spot between the freedom to express individuality and rebelling against a system of political corruption and injustice.
But in 1999, when the band’s lyrics were cited by the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, which resulted in 13 deaths, their message of resistance was suddenly eclipsed by the violence they had long condemned.
In January, a song by the band was featured in a TikTok video posted moments before a 17-year-old unleashed gunfire at Iowa’s Perry High School, killing two and wounding others.
And now, the band has once again been thrust into the spotlight by photos of 15-year-old freshman Natalie Rupnow, who on Monday killed a teacher and student at her private school in Madison, Wisconsin. The images show her wearing a black KMFDM band shirt while at a shooting range.
KMFDM issued a statement condemning the Columbine massacre, expressing sympathy for the victims and explaining its music was intended to stand against violence.
“KMFDM are an art form — not a political party. From the beginning our music has been a statement against war, oppression, fascism and violence against others,” read the statement at the time.
KMFDM told CNN on Saturday it has been “distressing” to be in a similar situation again, after “how unfairly maligned KMFDM was by the media during Columbine, in what was tantamount to a witch hunt.”
“We stand by these words as strongly now as we did back then,” KMFDM said in its statement. “We don’t believe Natalie Rupnow wore a KMFDM T-shirt because she’s necessarily a fan of the band, but instead because she glorified the Columbine shooters. Sadly, there’s a subculture of sick individuals who do have an obscure fascination with the Columbine massacre, and our band’s acronym will forever be associated with it.”
KMFDM said the concern should not be its music but the ubiquitous culture of gun violence in the United States, with a persistent rise in gun-related deaths and mass shootings that have killed hundreds of children and school staff in classrooms.
“In a culture that is obsessed with guns, people will always try and blame someone or something else for these tragic events, rather than the abundant and easy access to firearms,” KMFDM said.
The past year has continued to see a rising number of school shootings and a lack of legislation to curb gun violence. There have been at least 83 school shootings in the US so far this year as of December 16, according to CNN’s analysis of events reported by the Gun Violence Archive, Education Week and Everytown for Gun Safety.
“After every school shooting, we outsource our conversations, difficult decisions, policies, and our sense of societal guilt to symbols, so we can point to them and say, ‘Oh, well, they listen to this rock band’ and we no longer have to have a conversation about gun control, or the degree to which we are raising our adolescents through screens and algorithms that veer their screens toward extremist politics,” [Alexander Reed, a professor of music at Ithaca College] said.
“We are missing the point – that the problem is not the music, it’s the guns.”