A drone can reach a school shooter in 60 seconds. The vendor is the one making that promise.

A Colorado school district in the same county where a 2019 shooting killed one student and injured eight is buying a new security tool this month: a drone that its manufacturer says can reach and incapacitate a school shooter in about 60 seconds.

The vendor making that promise is Campus Guardian Angel, the company that would also deploy and test the drone in the schools that pay for it. The unit of school-security response just shifted from minutes to seconds inside a single quarter, and the validator shifted with it.

The bottleneck was always response time. In interviews, Marston has argued that parents no longer accept the traditional police arrival window — a gap he frames as five to eight minutes — as an acceptable baseline for school safety. Campus Guardian Angel is selling schools the next minute: a remotely piloted aircraft that can break through a window, enter a classroom, and incapacitate a shooter before officers reach the building.

Justin Marston, co-founder and CEO, calls the drone a "lump of plastic" that can neutralize an armed person in a minute. The device carries mounted cameras that stream to law enforcement and a speakerphone that lets police talk through the drone to teachers and students inside a room. The company's marketing video is on CNN's TikTok.

The company has not published independent test data showing the 60-second window works in the conditions a school shooting creates: low light, glass, crowds, an armed adult with a rifle. CBS News has reported on a competing system, Mithril, which uses pepper spray rather than blunt impact, and it faces the same validation gap. Education Week has framed the category as "promising tool or unproven strategy."

The market, by Marston's own estimate, is $3 to $4 billion a year. The Urban Institute put the school resource officer line alone at $2.62 billion in 2023. The total folds in metal detectors, SROs, and the new drone category, and the CEO's number is a self-estimate inside the market he sells to.

The first wave of buyers is not a procurement committee. It is parents who have already buried a child. Three Florida counties have committed more than $1 million in state allocations. Five Georgia schools are funded by the state legislature. Colorado is deploying this month. Texas districts are in the pipeline, per CNN affiliate KSAT. All four states carry histories of high-profile school shootings, and the loudest advocates in each are the families of the dead.

What changes next is the standard a school is held to. A district that buys the drone is now buying a 60-second window, and the only party certifying that window is the company billing for it. The next school year starts with a labeled promise, sold to the families with the most to lose, in the buildings where a five-to-eight-minute police response was once the floor.