Our mission to prevent school shootings.
Our Mission
Cover’s mission is to prevent school shootings by installing our weapon detection system in the 130,000 K-12 schools across the U.S.
The Company
Every week students are dying. School shootings keep me up at night. I have young kids who are now starting to go to school. This is not a future I want to accept. I believe new technology advancements can be used to end school shootings, creating a safe environment for students.
The 10x rise in K-12 school shootings in the last decade stands not only as a challenge to our national security but also casts a shadow of fear across our nation. Cover is confronting this emerging threat head-on.
Cover is an AI security company developing concealed weapon detection systems. Cover’s imaging technology scans students for concealed weapons in K-12 schools in the United States. Our goal is to identify concealed weapons inside of bags and underneath clothing.
The Present
In the last decade, we have seen a 10x increase in the number of K-12 school shootings in the United States. The chart below shows the number of unique shootings per year since 1990:
Our research has found the following in K‑12 schools
97%Unplanned shootings
Percentage of shootings that are unplanned; they occur when students sneak weapons into school repeatedly and a dispute escalates.
87%Handguns
Small handguns represent 87% of the guns used in school shootings (such as a subcompact 9mm). Followed by rifles, then shotguns.
75%Concealed in bags and clothing
Percentage of guns that are concealed inside a backpack, pocket, or waistband as they enter schools.
High-profile incidents like Columbine, Parkland, and Sandy Hook receive widespread media coverage, but in reality, such large-scale attacks happen once or twice a year. 97% of school shootings are unplanned attacks that occur when students regularly carry concealed handguns into school, and are involved in a dispute that escalates. This means if you can find handguns in bags or underneath clothing, you can prevent a majority of school shootings.
The Possibility
The advent of 3D-printed firearms underscores the reality that guns can now be manufactured in any household. Given this fact, the most effective strategy for preventing shootings hinges on our capacity to accurately determine whether someone is carrying a concealed weapon.
An advanced AI-powered perception system capable of intelligently identifying weapons will enable us to save lives.
The Solution
The Cover team has designed an AI-powered weapon imaging system that can detect concealed weapons through bags and clothing. Our technology is an active terahertz imaging radar system that operates between 310 to 350 GHz. The radar is as safe around humans as Wi-Fi. The radar returns an image point cloud which is then analyzed by an AI object detection neural network to identify weapons. This means we can see through bags and clothing, image physical items as weapons, and use advanced AI to classify those objects as threats.
Our technology will be placed at the major entrances of schools. We will be scanning each student from up to 15 feet away and in every direction. Once a weapon is identified, we will work to disarm the student.
It’s important to note this isn’t just a system for schools—the application is much broader. K-12 schools are our first major priority, but over time we will expand into other public venues such as airports, churches, stadiums, and hospitals. In the limit, I believe you won’t move around the physical world without weapon detection systems such as this.
How We Can Do It
Each day our stealth detection system isn’t in schools is another day a student is killed. Time is our enemy. So we are building a company culture designed to ship reliable systems as fast as humanly possible.
In the near term, we hope to install Cover in high schools as our first “beta schools.” Once we can validate system reliability, we will launch into higher-volume manufacturing. The hardware is being designed over an iterative product roadmap, each version improving as part of a continuum.
There will be many technical challenges to bringing this solution to market. Here are some of the key risks we hope to pare down in the coming years:
System Reliability: The system needs to work every day, rain or shine. This is always a challenge for nascent startups introducing a product into commercialization. We will objectively judge this as the number of students Cover’s system catches with a weapon divided by the number of students actually carrying weapons. Basically, how good are we at finding every weapon over a time series.
Disarming Students: When we are successful at identifying a student with a weapon, the next challenge is to safely separate the weapon from the student. In 2023, there were thousands of reported incidents of guns within K-12 schools. Our process will be to work closely with the school and local law enforcement to safely disarm the student.
System Cost: There is a sizable hardware design scope to this technology that includes radar optics, actuators, computers, GPUs, cameras, and power distribution. It will be critical for us to reduce the overall price point to a level that can be both economical for the company and the budgets that exist in the K-12 school districts.
Artificial Intelligence: Building an AI system that can take in sparse point clouds and output low false positives will be highly challenging. We will need to do this fully autonomously and without any human in the loop to reduce costs and enable the system to scale up to 130,000 K-12 schools in the United States.
Conclusion
In summary here is the first phase of our Master Plan:
Validate prototype can detects weapons with low false positives
Roll out to beta schools in the U.S., validate system performance
Start manufacturing for the 130,000 K-12 schools
If you are interested, please join us on our mission to end school shootings and save lives.
