fired, often an indicator of incident severity, are both tolerable and a drastic improvement for typical police dispatching scenarios when compared against the several minutes that elapse from when an actual discharge occurs to the cumulative time of several minutes that pass when a person decides to place a 9-1-1 call and that information is captured, processed, and dispatched to patrol officers. Because such systems have arrays of highly sensitive microphones that are continuously active, there have been concerns over privacy with this broad ability to record conversations without the knowledge of those being recorded (this is "collateral eavesdropping", because capturing conversations is only an inadvertent capability of the system's design, and law enforcement agencies have stated that the recording happens only after shots have been detected.) Optical Optical or electro-optical systems detect either the physical phenomenon of the muzzle flash of a bullet being fired or the heat caused by the friction of the bullet as it moves through the air. Such systems require a line of sight to the area where the weapon is being fired or the projectile while it is in motion. Although a general line of sight to the shot event is required, detections are sometimes available as the infrared flash event bounces off surrounding structures. Just like acoustic-based systems, electro-optical systems can generally be degraded by specialized suppression devices that minimize their sound or optical signatures. Optical and electro-optical systems have seen success in military environments where immediacy of response is critical and because they generally do not need careful location registration as is generally the case for more permanently installed "civil" crime fighting systems. Just as acoustic systems require more than one microphone to locate gunshots, most electro-optical systems require more than one sensor when covering 360 degrees. Acoustic and optical sensors can be co-located and their data can be fused thereby enabling the gunshot location processing to have a more exact discharge time that can be used to calculate the distance of the discharge to the sensors with the greatest possible precision. Optical systems are (essentially) not limited to the number of individual shots being fired or the number of different shooters shooting simultaneously, allowing optical-based sensing to easily declare and locate shooters conducting ambushes that employ multiple shooters, shooting from multiple locations during the same time period. The combination of both approaches (acoustic and infrared) assists in overcoming each system's own