#HTE

Suggestions for Physical Anti-Vegas-Shooting Countermeasures

As designers, we naturally 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

Image by New York Times

- 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." 

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. 

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.

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?

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.”

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.

The same reader also alternatively suggested “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.

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.

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. 

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? 

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.

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.