The parents of a teenager who was killed in Florida's Parkland school shooting in 2018 have started a bold new project called The Shotline to lobby for stricter gun laws in the country. The Shotline uses AI to recreate the voices of children killed by gun violence and send recordings through automated calls to lawmakers, The Wall Street Journal reported. The project launched on Wednesday, six years after a gunman killed 17 people and injured more than a dozen at a high school in Parkland, Florida. It features the voice of six children, some as young as ten, and young adults, who have lost their lives in incidents of gun violence across the US. Once you type in your zip code, The Shotline finds your local representative and lets you place an automated call from one of the six dead people in their own voice, urging for stronger gun control laws.

Families of gun violence victims are using artificial intelligence to recreate their loved ones' voices and taunt lawmakers who oppose gun control on the sixth anniversary of the Parkland massacre. The robocall messages are being sent to senators and House members who support the National Rifle Association and Second Amendment rights in a campaign that launched on Valentine's Day, Wednesday, according to the Associated Press. Manuel and Patricia Oliver, whose son Joaquin "Guac" Oliver died in the 2018 high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, said the campaign run through The Shotline website is intended to spur Congress to ban the sale of guns like the AR-15 rifle. "We come from a place where gun violence is a problem, but you will never see a 19-year-old with an AR-15 getting into a school and shooting people," Manuel Oliver told the Associated Press in an interview. The Olivers, immigrants from Venezuela, became activists after Joaquin and 13 other students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were murdered by a 19-year-old killer with a rifle.

Joe Levy is working hard to help avoid another mass school shooting tragedy. He says his technology, designed to spot a gun using existing CCTV cameras, could make a critical difference in future life-or-death situations. Seventeen people died in 2018 when a 19-year-old student opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, USA. Fifteen died in the Columbine High School massacre, near Denver, Colorado, in 1999 when a 17-year-old and an 18-year-old shot fellow students. And 22 people died in May of this year when an 18-year-old rampaged through the Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas – one of the worst school shootings in US history.

For Adam Jasinski, a technology director for a school district outside of St Louis, Missouri, monitoring student emails used to be a time-consuming job. Jasinski used to do keyword searches of the official school email accounts for the district's 2,600 students, looking for words like "suicide" or "marijuana". Then he would have to read through every message that included one of the words. The process would occasionally catch some concerning behavior, but "it was cumbersome", Jasinski recalled. Last year Jasinski heard about a new option: following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the technology company Bark was offering schools free, automated, 24-hour-a-day surveillance of what students were writing in their school emails, shared documents and chat messages, and sending alerts to school officials any time the monitoring technology flagged concerning phrases.

During the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018, the shooter was caught on a security camera pulling his rifle out of a duffle bag in the staircase 15 seconds before discharging the first round. However, the School Resource Officer didn't enter the building because he wasn't confident about the situation, and the Coral Springs Police Department had no idea what the shooter even looked like until 7 minutes and 30 seconds after the first round was fired. If the video system had included technology to recognize the gun threat in real time, alerts could have been sent to the security team. An announcement could have been made right away for all students and faculty in Building 12 to barricade their doors, and law enforcement could have responded a lot faster to a real-time feed of timely and accurate information. Aegis AI offers such a technology, which the company says enables existing security cameras to automatically recognize gun threats and notify security in real-time.

Talking about acts of violence like mass shootings with your children is not easy. If you have to have that difficult talk, remember the four S's. Video games again have been invoked as one of the causes of violence in the U.S. in the wake of mass shootings this weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. President Donald Trump, who last year held a video game summit after the February 2018 Parkland, Florida, shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was among several public officials who called out video games as a potential factor in shootings, mentioning video games and violence. President Donald Trump on Monday condemned white nationalism and said he supported "red flag" laws, which could limit a person's access to firearms if the person is determined to be a potential threat to the public.

On Feb. 14, 2018, a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The incident was the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history, and in the year since, various tech companies across the nation have ramped up efforts to use artificial intelligence to prevent similar tragedies -- and they claim the systems are flagging many violent incidents before they happen. A new story by USA Today details several of the companies offering services that use AI to prevent school shootings. Bark's AI monitors students' text messages, emails, and social media accounts for signs of cyberbullying, drug use, depression, and other possible safety concerns, sending automatic alerts to officials in more than 1,100 school districts when it notes something suspicious.

Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School walk through the Florida state Capitol in Tallahassee. Schools are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence-backed solutions to stop tragic acts of student violence such as the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a year ago. Bark Technologies, Gaggle.Net, and Securly Inc. are three companies that employ AI and machine learning to scan student emails, texts, documents, and in some cases, social media activity. They look for warning signs of cyber bullying, sexting, drug and alcohol use, depression, and to flag students who may pose a violent risk not only to themselves, but classmates. When potential problems are found, and depending on the severity, school administrators, parents -- and under the most extreme cases -- law enforcement officials, are alerted.

Teenagers who play violent video games are no more prone to real world aggressive behaviour than their peers, according to UK researchers who say their negative effects have been overstated. Fears that gory games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty might make children think on-screen behaviours are acceptable have been a major concern for parents and policy makers for years. Last year President Donald Trump said violent games were "shaping young people's thoughts" in the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting in Parklands, Florida. But one of the most comprehensive studies to date, led by University of Oxford researchers, found no evidence of increased aggression among teens who had spent longer playing violent games in the past month. "The idea that violent video games drive real-world aggression is a popular one, but it hasn't tested very well over time," says lead researcher Professor Andrew Przybylski, director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute.

In the 11 months since 17 teachers and students were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, campuses across the country have started spending big on surveillance technology. The Lockport, New York, school district spent $1.4 million in state funds on a facial-recognition system. Schools in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles have adopted artificial-intelligence software--prone to false positives--that scans students' Facebook and Twitter accounts for signs that they might become a shooter. In New Mexico, students as young as 6 are under acoustic surveillance, thanks to a gunshot-detection program originally developed for use by the military to track enemy snipers. Earlier this month, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission released its report on the safety and security failures that contributed to fatalities during last year's shooting.