Hold your fireworks

Well, I hope all of you had a restful and relaxing Independence Day, filled with family, friends, and most importantly, food.

What I hope you didn’t have this week was an earful of gunfire. That might be too much to hope for after the holiday was host to several violent mass shooting incidents. Yes, more than one. It started on Monday evening with three killed and eight wounded in Fort Worth, Texas when assailants began shooting into a crowd. Nine were injured in a shooting that occurred in Washington D.C. at a celebration, four killed and seven injured in Shreveport, La., and one was killed and six injured at a shooting during a block party in Salisbury, Md.

That violence culminated with an incident in Philadelphia where a 40-year-old man killed five and injured 30 people during the holiday. If that sounds like a lot of violence for one day I would only remind you that those are the shootings I know of, and that this occurred last year too, remember the Highland Park parade shooting? It was one year to the day. The Fourth of July has become synonymous with violence.

Fortunately, there are entities working in the security industry to combat this type of violence. Just last week I wrote about ZeroEyes deploying their AI-based gun detection system for Muscogee Nation Gaming Enterprises. By the time you’re reading this blog there will likely be two fresh stories concerning news in the gun and shooter detection segment of the industry. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has done wonders for making this kind of technology viable and easily deployable with existing monitoring equipment.

With that in mind and many U.S. towns and cities wired for surveillance in public places, I hope any of my readers in that corner of the security industry will consider reaching out to our local governments to offer them their expertise and assistance in this matter.

We seem to need the help badly.