Nearly 400,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 attack at Columbine High School. In the decades since, federal gun safety legislation has been rare. Schools have responded with metal detectors, armed guards, lockdown drills, and now, pepper-spraying drones.

Campus Guardian Angel (CGA), an Austin, Texas company, is deploying active-shooter response drones to schools in Florida, Georgia, and Colorado this year. The drones, launched remotely and capable of reaching any point on campus within seconds, can locate a shooter in 15 seconds and engage within 60, using sirens, non-lethal pepper spray, and 60-mph impacts to slow the threat until police arrive. Florida and Georgia have each committed hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds to pilot the program. The cost to school districts runs about $4 per student per month.

The technology is promising. "The best-case scenario is we put this in every single school in America and then never have to use it," CGA co-founder Bill King told Barron's. "Because it's got a deterrent quality to it." A 60-second drone response is genuinely faster than law enforcement in almost any scenario.

But drones buy seconds. Laws prevent shootings.

Congress has watched school shooting after school shooting and declined to pass universal background checks, red flag laws, or meaningful restrictions on the weapons most commonly used in mass shootings. Florida and Georgia found state money for drones. The federal government can find the will for legislation.

Our students deserve both: every tool available to slow a shooter already inside a school, and the political will to keep shooters from getting there in the first place.

Sign this petition to demand federal funding for school safety technology in every public school and passage of federal gun safety legislation, including universal background checks and red flag laws, that treats school shootings as the preventable crisis they are.