In the weeks after the Connecticut school shooting, as the
nation puzzled over how it happened and what might prevent it from happening
again, Kamal Sarabandi was listening to the news. Talk turned to giving
teachers guns, and he paused.
"I said, there must be a better way," Sarabandi
recalled.
Then he had an epiphany. Sarabandi is an electrical
engineering professor at the University of Michigan. His specialty is remote
sensing—detecting objects and gathering information from a distance. And for
several years ending in mid-2012, he was funded by the Department of Defense to
tweak a type of radar not too different from the kind police use to nab
speeders and use it to find weapons and bombs concealed on a person's body.