School Shootings: An Ounce of Prevention.... (OSIS, VSYM, ASEI)

It's tragic that it's taken yet-another shooting - and another death - to remake the point that our nation's schools are, broadly speaking, not safe. Seventeen year-old Centennial, Colorado high school student Claire Davis died on December 21st after being shot at Arapahoe High School on December 13th. That follows the October 21st shooting in Sparks, Nevada, in which a middle school student shot and killed a teacher, then himself. It was less than a year after the horrifying school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that claimed 26 lives.... 20 children and six adults. It's difficult to come to any other conclusion than school systems aren't equipped to protect our children.

It's worth noting that it's not their fault. The measures needed to defend a primary and secondary school are foreboding, and can be expensive, and therefore are politically unpopular. Sadly though, each school shooting victim's death chips away at the disdain for physical barriers and checkpoints at a school's doors. Enter View Systems Inc. (OTCBB:VSYM).

For tech-savvy investors who know which companies make them, when they hear the words "weapons detection" or "body scanners", they tend to think of companies like American Science & Engineering, Inc. (NASDAQ:ASEI) and OSI Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:OSIS). And well they should. OSIS and ASEI are two of the biggest North American providers of the kind of equipment you might see being used by airport security personnel screening passengers before allowing them to their gate. There's just one challenge in the average school system tapping OSI Systems or American Science & Engineering to help defend their school grounds.... their hardware starts with a six-figure price tag, and rapidly works its way up to higher-capacity and more powerful versions. For a school with multiple doors, it's simply not feasible. View Systems Inc. is a viable alternative.

While arguably not as robust, View Systems' ViewScan walk-through scanner is just as effective and just as viable as a system made by OSI Systems, Inc. or American Science & Engineering, Inc., but at a significantly lower price. The typical ViewScan system starts at a cost of about $10,000. It's an amount most school systems can afford to pay, even when multiple locations each with multiple doors must be secured.

In fact, the VSYM system has already been utilized by several school systems, including the Detroit public school system where, interestingly enough, no shooting or major acts of violence have taken place since the systems were installed despite the area being known as at least a little more dangerous than average. Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.

The bottom line is, while no security system is perfect, what View Systems Inc. can offer comes amazingly close to perfection. It's effective, and affordable (especially compared to similar hardware made by American Science & Engineering OSI Systems), without being intrusive - the systems are little more than doorways to walkthrough, not unlike the theft detection scanners you might find at the exit of a retail establishment. While no weapons detection system can outright prevent a gunman who wanted into a building from coming into it, there's no doubt that the ViewScan system would be able to provide an early warning of a shooter, and give students and teachers time to secure their classrooms.

Some investors might say its immoral to capitalize on tragedy, and that's an understandable sentiment. And investment in VSYM (or in OSIS or ASEI for that matter) isn't an investment in horrifying acts, however. It's an investment in their prevention, which may be about as morally water-tight as it gets.

For more on View Systems, visit the corporate website here.