Video News Clips: In Their Own Words

Tech Founder Says Most School Shootings Are Preventable — And Explains How

Screenshot/YouTube/Shawn Ryan Show

Cover founder Brett Adcock said on “The Shawn Ryan Show” Tuesday that the vast majority of school shootings were preventable and explained how technology could help stop them.

Cover found in its research that 97% of school shootings are not planned, with students frequently taking guns with them prior to ultimately firing them. Adcock said on the show that schools could implement imaging technology to detect these students’ guns, arguing it would be preferable to metal detectors.

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“[The] majority of all school shootings are unplanned. Most of them, like almost all of them, are some kid bringing a gun in habitually. It’s like their uncle’s gun and they bring it in school like every day for like three months,” Adcock said. “They get in a fight at recess and they shoot the gun … The ones where you see like a planned event that’s like on like CNN where somebody’s like coming in with a machine gun or automatic weapon. It happens like one or two times a year.”

The founder said that while it would be challenging or “impossible” to prevent planned school shootings, it was possible to “stop all those” more common unplanned shootings.

“I think you can avoid those. Meaning like you can prevent them by knowing if somebody has a gun on them,” Adcock said. “You can do it the old-fashioned way, which is like metal detectors and all this other stuff, but we don’t want the kids to go to school like that. That’s just like not how I want my kids growing up.”

“So basically the reason why I got obsessed with like, terahertz imaging is you could basically do this at a larger offset — 10, 20, 30 meters away. You can do it at a high frame rate,” he added. “And you basically get back a point cloud. You basically get back an image. It’s like a three-dimensional camera image almost, but it’s done in like a radio frequency.”

Adcock said schools could use the technology to scan students at entrances from short distances.

“You can scan people as they’re walking in passively … don’t need to stop anybody,” he said. “And … most guns that are brought in schools are either in your pocket, waistband or backpack … and you can basically find them.”

Host Shawn Ryan asked if the technology could detect guns in backpacks. Adcock answered affirmatively.

“You can find them in backpacks. You can find them in waistbands and pockets,” the founder said.

There have already been at least 26 instances of gunfire at American schools in 2026 as of March 19,  according to gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.