Morning Wire - The 5-Second School Defense System Being Tested In Florida

Episode Date: April 18, 2026

A new system being tested in Florida uses remotely piloted drones to respond to school shootings in seconds—deploying non-lethal force to distract, disable, and stop attackers before police arrive. Morning Wire speaks with Justin Marston, the CEO of Campus Guardian Angel, whose program aims to rethink school safety nationwide. Get the facts first with Morning Wire.- - -Ep. 2740- - -Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3- - -Today's Sponsors:Alliance Defending Freedom - Visit https://JoinADF.com/WIRE or text 'WIRE' to 83848 to learn more.NetSuite - Get the free business guide, Demystifying AI, at https://Netsuite.com/MORNINGWIRE- - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacymorning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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but a new pilot program hopes to provide a breakthrough for preventing and responding to them. The key, drones, and a lot of them. When we show this to law enforcement, it is like we invented electricity. In this episode, we speak to the head of a company that's installing these systems now in schools in Florida. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley, with Georgia Howell. This is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. I want to tell you about our friends and aligns defending freedom. ADF is a Christian legal ministry dedicated to advancing free speech, religious freedom, the sanctity of life, parental rights, and God's design for marriage and family.

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Justin, tell us about this program. This is a pilot program. We haven't seen anything like this before. You're using drones as a deterrent for potential mass shootings in schools. How does this actually work? Yeah, it's a deterrent, but also, you know, a proactive solution. So we are using drones, really. The idea came from seeing how incredibly effective drones were against people with guns and saying, hey, if we could use just less lethal effects and we could put these drones in schools ahead of time, like the fire sprinkler system, and then fly them from a central op center, then it would allow us to be everywhere all at once, which is really the challenge of mass shootings. It's like, how do you have an elite kind of capability that is at all of the, you know, thousands of schools at the same time.

Right. Logistically, that seems overwhelming. So the idea is that you have pilots ready to go in case there's an emergency. How do you actually pull that off? What kind of team do you have to have per school for this to work? Yes, yeah. See, the key thing in the way that we work is that we have a team in Austin, and then we're able to fly these drones over a network, over an encrypted channel on the internet, anywhere in the nation.

So from our one location in Austin, our teams of pilots and former, you know, SWAT and SEALs and others, those teams can cover any school in a nation in five seconds. So really the challenge in school safety is, look, I've got thousands of sites. It's very unlikely that any given one of them is going to have a shooting. But statistically across the whole, you know, of the US, there's around 200 to 300 schools. school shootings each year. And then the problem is they're over so fast. And in two minutes, in two minutes they're typically done. So there's no time for police to get there from somewhere else. So really you're limited to like whatever you've got on site, that's what it's going to be. And that's why obviously we don't only rely on fire men, fire crews. We rely on sprinkler systems

to keep our kids safe in schools because if there's a fire, the sprinkler system can put water on that fire immediately. And so we would say, look, we're a lot like that, but we're really designed to go after a school shooter and get them pacified before they have chance to murder lots of children. So to be clear, these are not automated drones. These are piloted drones. That's right. And then what measures can they actually take to stop a shooting? Yeah, so we have kind of three levels of escalation. The first one is that we have a siren and we have a strobe so we can kind of come along, distract, we could tell them to get on the ground. And a lot of people, you know, a lot of shooters, just when they meet the first wave of authority,

will give up. The second step, if they continue to, you know, if they don't, if they start trying to shoot at the drone or do something like that, well, then we can cover them in pepper spray. And we have like a pepper gel that we can eject from the drone. and so yeah, our goal is to make it impossible for them to see. And if they can't see anything, then they can't target children. But if they really continue to try, if they're still trying to blindly fire the gun or something like that,

then we can hit the drones at high, you know, we can hit them with the drones at high speed. And you get hit by a drone at 60 miles an hour. You know, it's going to be really hard to shoot people after that. Right. We saw some of that footage you guys have shown at the testing on these with dummies, and it's pretty remarkable. Now, it's important you guys have stressed that these are non-lethal means of dealing with an active shooter. There's nothing lethal about these drones

at all, correct? That's right. So we don't have any lethal effects because we don't need them. And we're incredibly capable of getting that person on the ground without having to resort to lethality. And really, we're the only way to stop some lunatic with an AR-15 in your kid's school without having to put more guns in schools. So, you know, the advantage of using less lethal effects is that, firstly, if we do make a mistake, we've got pepper spray on the wrong kid, but we didn't just put, you know, three slugs in their chest and they're off to, you know, emergency ER. So the implications are less.

And also, we don't care if we get shot. And so given we don't care if we get shot, you know, we can take a lot more. risk in target evaluation than you can ask a human to take. We can scream down the corridor. We can, you know, go in the room, look around for longer. And if somebody shoots at us, they're shooting up because we always fly high above people's heads. They're not shooting kids. And we just come in with more drones like a video game. So like we're typically putting 30 to 60 drones in the school. So this isn't like the one great hope single drone bright, shiny object. Our whole model is, look, we're just going to put a bunch of them in there, and then whichever box they're closest to,

that's how we get there so quickly. So our goal is to respond in five seconds, to be on the shoot in 15 seconds, and to degrade or incapacitate in 60 seconds. It seems to me that, you know, if nothing else, this would provide more intel for authorities as they arrive, is that correct? Yeah, we don't think any police officer, school guardian, teacher should have to risk their lives unnecessarily by going into a situation blind without understanding it. And so, you know, a big function of our team and all of the, you know, the folks we have at our headquarters is to feed that situational awareness that we're building to first responders

so that they know where to go. They know what they're walking into. And then also, you know, we don't think that an officer should be in a fair fight with a lunatic with a gun. We think it should be wildly unfair in the officer's favor. And so just us being there, I mean, we really turn each of your SROs into kind of like an Avenger, you know, because they're surrounded by drones. There's drones going ahead of them. I mean, when we show this to law enforcement, it is like we invented electricity.

There really isn't any other way to describe it. It's so unbelievably obvious once you see it that it's compelling. It's so much better than what they have to do, what they're being asked to do right now, which is an incredibly difficult task. So put this way, of course, this seems like a no-brainer, but obviously the cost factor is the big question here. Is this cost prohibitive? Is this actually possible within existing budgets for schools to install these? Is the school buys the drones up front? We're about four bucks a kid a month. If they don't, if they finance the whole thing out of their operating budget, we're about eight bucks a kid a month. We are around a sixth of the cost on install of putting in a sprinkler system. there hasn't been a mass fire in the school since 1958,

but since that time, thousands of children have been shot in schools. And then the other thing I would say is, look, when we go and put our stuff in a school, it's like you hired, like in a high school, it's like you hired another 10 SROs

or 10 police officers in terms of response time. So we're like a tenth of the cost of trying to get to the same response time using only humans, risking a lot more human lives, you know, than using drones like they. drone-enabled offices are so much more capable,

they're so much more, they're so much safer, and we really cut down the time that a lunatic has to murder children before they're confronted and ultimately pacified. That's a solid sales pitch there. Now, final question, I know you've already started to install some of these at schools in different states. Would you walk us through that? Where have you already launched this program?

Yeah, so we're actually installing right now in our first school in Volusia. in Florida. We're very grateful to the governor and the Education Commission are there for being the first state to move out with the state pilot program to prove this out. And we're hoping to expand that into other counties. We're doing Broward, Volusia and Leon counties right now. And then, as I say, there's a bunch of districts in Florida that would like to expand into the program later in the summer. And then in Georgia, there's five schools that we are deploying to the final list isn't completely done yet, but it's been talked about by the legislature.

It went through as part of the amended budget that was passed by the governor of Georgia here recently. And so we're doing those. And then we have some private schools and some public schools where the parents just decided that they wanted to raise the money organically. They basically did a fundraiser and said, hey, we're worried. We have a very open campus or, you know, another one had a near brush with a mass shooting that got, you know, foiled by the FBI. But, you know, there, they just looked at it and they kind of said, hey, I couldn't live with myself. If I knew something like this existed and it wasn't in our kid's school and then something happened. It would be like not having a fire sprinkler system in there.

And then there's a fire and a whole bunch of kids die. I wouldn't be able to live with myself. So that's really the range. And, you know, we're working in other states, another seven or eight states right now, and we expect to see deployments into some pilot schools in those before the end of the year. That's all exciting. I'm actually from Leon County, so I'm glad to hear you guys are installing there. Justin, thank you so much for talking with us.

Yeah. That was Campus Guardian Angel CEO, Justin Marston, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.