A Catholic school in Arkansas has adopted AI technology to help spot potential shooters and alert law enforcement before a shooting takes place. Source: EWTN News.
The security company ZeroEyes said Trinity Catholic School in Fort Smith is the first private school in the state to utilise its gun detection platform, one that interfaces with the school’s own security system and leverages AI to identify school shooters before they enter the building.
Principal Zach Edwards said the school has been enhancing its safety measures over the past several years, including with controlled access points, increased fencing, and school-wide security cameras.
There have been no school shootings locally, Mr Edwards said, but the 2023 shooting at the Presbyterian Covenant School in Nashville, as well as the August 2025 shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, offered greater impetus to implement the detection system.
“We’d already started our approach to school safety, but after those two shootings, we made it an even bigger priority,” he said.
Chris Heilig, the senior adviser for school safety and technology at ZeroEyes, said the platform utilises an extensive internal database of guns and gun types to recognise weapons detected by security cameras.
At a central “operation centre”, Mr Heilig said, ZeroEyes employees monitor feeds of every security system around the country to which the AI platform has access.
The feeds themselves are not monitored in real time, Mr Heilig said; rather, the system alerts monitors when any one camera detects a gun threat, after which employees quickly review the footage and alert law enforcement if necessary.
School officials, including security officers, are also alerted in the event of a shooter situation, Mr Heilig said. Meanwhile, security cameras will continue to track a shooter’s movements around a building or campus, giving law enforcement critical information about a gunman’s whereabouts.
Mr Edwards said the current climate calls for high-tech security to counteract threats to schools.
“I hope more Catholic schools in US have the opportunity to invest in this kind of security,” he said. “It’s time. We need it.”
FULL STORY
Arkansas Catholic school adopts AI gun-detection security system: ‘It’s time. We need it’ (By Daniel Payne, EWTN News)
