Texas Lawmaker Proposes Drones for School Security: A “Less-Lethal” Solution

Mithril Defense and Texas Legislators Push for UAVs with Pepper Spray to Enhance School Safety Amid Funding Challenges

by DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

An Austin-based defense and security company is promoting the use of drones to provide security at public schools, and at least one Texas lawmaker has apparently signed on to the idea.

In a posting on a site maintained by the Texas Politics Project, Mithril Defense advertised an opening for an individual to lead an advocacy campaign to sell the idea of “using drones to help stop school gun violence.”

The company, said it is “collaborating with various parts of the Texas legislature on permitting and funding” to allow its drone services to be used in the state’s public schools and expects to launch a pilot program in several of the state’s top 10 school districts as early as next year.

“We find that our approach is bipartisan, and believe it will help save lives,” said the posting on the site maintained by the University of Texas at Austin.

Mithril Defense, a private start-up company in its first year of operation, boasts that its team includes a former Navy SEAL Team Six command master chief, a serial tech entrepreneur, the #1 American drone pilot on ESPN and various technical teams.” The company also said it is working with an influential Texas lobbyist, who has held several roles in the administration of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, to sell the idea to legislators.

The posting states that a bill has been introduced into the State Legislature that would call for the use of UAVs to bolster security in Texas schools.

The bill that the posting refers to is apparently House Bill 462, introduced by State Representative Ryan Guillen, a Republican representing the Rio Grande Valley area. The bill, which pertains to the hiring of armed guards and other security measures at Texas schools, would allow some schools to substitute drones capable of dispersing pepper-spray or other irritants, to take the place of an armed human guard.

According to the proposed legislation, “at least one remote-human-operated aerial device,” could be deployed for every 200 students enrolled at the district. Such an aerial device would be required to be capable of “providing less-lethal interdiction capability by means of air-based irritant delivery or other mechanisms.”

Guillen did not reply to several attempts by DroneLife to reach him for comment on the proposed legislation.

The bill’s chances of passage in its current form is far from assured. The Texas Legislature only goes into session once every two years for a period of five months, with the next session scheduled to get under way in January.

Hundreds of bills are proposed at the outset of every legislative session, with only a handful making their way into becoming law.

The question of how best to ensure the safety of Texas schoolchildren has been a hot-button issue for a while now. In the wake of a mass school shooting in the town of Uvalde in 2022, the Legislature in its 2023 session passed a law mandating the presence of an armed law enforcement officer in every school in the state.

However, the law was never fully implemented as many school districts have struggled to raise the funds necessary to pay for the additional security and to find enough trained law enforcement personnel to protect every school campus in the state.

House Bill 3, the 2023 school security law, provides each Lone Star State school district $15,000 per campus and $10 per student to fund its required security measures. In addition to calling for the use of drones to take the place of human security officers in some cases, Guillen’s bill would increase that per-student funding to pay for security measures to about $100.

The bill would also allocate an annual allotment of $100,000 or greater to each school district to pay for mental health services for students.

Mithril Defense is being tight-lipped about the details of its plan to promote the use of security drones in Texas schools. In an email to DroneLife, in a response to a request for comment for this story, CEO Justin Marston said, “We’re still in stealth right now, but we could chat more in [the second quarter of] next year.”

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Read more:

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.