An injured teenage survivor of a January 2025 shooting at a Nashville, Tennessee high school has sued Omnilert, the manufacturer of the AI gun detection system that failed to spot the handgun used in an attack that left two people dead, including the shooter. The lawsuit was filed last month in Davidson County court and also names System Integrations, the reseller that deployed the technology inside Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools. It is the first known case of its kind against an AI gun detection vendor.
Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools approved a contract worth over $1 million in 2023 to install Omnilert's computer vision layer on top of the district's existing camera network. The promise was simple: train AI on the live video feeds, flag a visible firearm in real time, and cut precious seconds off the alert-and-lockdown timeline. On the day of the shooting, the system did not fire that alert.
MNPS spokesperson Sean Braisted addressed the failure in a press conference shortly after the attack, pointing to the shooter's position relative to the cameras.
“wasn't close enough to get an accurate read and to activate that alarm”— Sean Braisted, MNPS spokesperson
Key facts
- 01An injured teen survivor sued Omnilert in Davidson County court last month over a January 2025 Nashville shooting that left two dead.
- 02Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools approved a contract worth over $1 million in 2023 to layer Omnilert's AI gun detection on district cameras.
- 03MNPS said the shooter's position relative to cameras meant imagery 'wasn't close enough' to trigger the alarm.
- 04The suit alleges Omnilert marketed the system as something that 'could have mitigated or prevented' the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting.
- 05Plaintiff's counsel Chris Smith says this is the first known lawsuit of its kind against an AI gun detection vendor.
The complaint alleges Omnilert either knew or should have known about 'significant operational limitations in its gun detection system that could result in detection failures during actual emergencies, including limitations based on camera placement, proximity of the weapon to camera sensors, camera angle, lighting, and weapon visibility.' Those are the standard failure modes of any production computer vision system, and the suit's core claim is that Omnilert's public-facing marketing did not disclose them.
The lawsuit pulls heavily from Omnilert's own website as preserved on the Internet Archive in the days before the shooting. One cited passage states the company's AI 'could have mitigated or prevented tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.' The complaint notes that the pre-shooting commercial site made no mention of false alarms, false positives, or detection limitations of any kind.
Chris Smith, one of the plaintiff's attorneys, said he was skeptical of the underlying premise from the start.
Omnilert cofounder Ara Bagdasarian declined to answer questions about the case. System Integrations did not respond to a request for comment. The suit was first reported by WSMV in Nashville.
David Riedman, who maintains the K-12 School Shooting Database, said the notification gap that AI gun detection is meant to close is not the gap that actually exists in school shootings.
“I've never seen a school shooting where there was a lack of notification”— David Riedman, Education and security expert, K-12 School Shooting Database
Riedman added that every dollar routed into vision-based detection is a dollar not spent elsewhere. The money 'could have gone to a counselor or something else to a kid in crisis,' he said. 'Every decision that you make is pointing away resources from something else.' Smith framed his motivation similarly, saying he wanted the case to raise awareness 'beyond Mr. Hanin's own injuries.'
AI gun detection vendors have spent the last several years selling school districts and corporate campuses on a deceptively simple value proposition: a model watching the camera feed will catch the gun before a human dispatcher can. The Nashville case is the first time that pitch will be tested against a specific failed deployment in court, with marketing copy and detection limitations cited side by side in a complaint. How the court treats the gap between the promise on the website and the performance envelope a buyer would only learn about from a sales engineer will shape procurement language, vendor disclosures, and contract indemnities across the entire physical-security AI category — well before any judgment is entered.
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