Five Robins airmen and one from Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama worked for six months to develop a gunshot alarm that sounds an alert when shots are being fired. The Air Force currently is testing the device to determine whether is could be used at bases.
They entered the system into a contest sponsored by the U.S. State Department that sought technological solutions to issues of security and diplomacy. The Robins-led team was among six teams picked from more than 500 entries to present its system at a State Department conference in March. The team won an award for having the most economically feasible entry.
Capt. Chris Perrine, a program manager at Maxwell, is the only team member who is not an engineer.
He said gunfire cannot be heard throughout a building the way people may think. Even if people hear it, he said, they may not recognize the sound.
“People often don’t respond to the initial sound of a gunshot as an emergency,” Perrine said. “They respond with curiosity, which of course is dangerous to them.”
Device considered affordable
Gunshot detectors are not new, but the team’s idea was to develop a system that would work with an existing fire alarm system. Other gunshot alarms, Perrine said, are standalone systems that are much more costly. Knowing how budgets are tight, the team wanted to come up with something that not only would work but would be affordable.
Their system would send a distinct alarm throughout the building and would immediately notify emergency responders that shots had been fired.
The team came together in January 2015 after the Air Force Research Laboratory issued a challenge for airmen to come up with a technological solution to combat active shooters. Each of the team members applied individually, and then the team was formed.
They also received $60,000 and were given six months to work on the project away from their regular jobs, at a small lab created at Robins just for them. They contracted with the Mercer Engineering Research Center in Warner Robins for assistance in building the system.
Actual shootings researched
1st Lt. Andrew Hyde, an F-15 structural engineer at Robins, said the team did not immediately decide to pursue a gunshot detector system.
“We had free rein to go and build what we thought could help the problem,” he said.
For the first three months they studied actual active-shooter incidents to determine how technology might have helped. The more they looked, the more it started to seem that a warning system would save lives.
One that particularly drew their interest was the Washington Navy Yard shooting in 2013 in which 12 people died. Perrine said he thinks as few as three people would have died that day if the team’s gunshot alarm had been in place.
Perrine said if people in a building have enough warning to get behind a locked door, a shooter is almost never going to take the time to try to get through the door.
Hyde said it would mean a lot to the team if the Air Force decides to actually put the alarm in buildings.
“That would be the goal,” Hyde said. “That’s why we did the commander’s challenge and why we continue to pursue the system.”
Perrine said the team wants the system to go beyond the Air Force.
“That’s been our drive all along is to find a means to better protect our fellow personnel in the Air Force, and we would hope maybe this technology would make its way into the private sector at schools, hospitals and universities and such,” he said.
They tested the system at the Guardian Center in Perry to ensure that only a gunshot, and not other loud noises that might occur in a building, would set it off.
Other members of the team were Capt. Carlos Horner, 1st Lt. Evan Glowiak, 1st Lt. Daniel Gunderson and 1st Lt. Bruce Vonniederhausern.
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