Buying principles supplies usually means checking off a list that includes notebook exegesis, No. 2 pencils, colored markers and a ruler. Now some parents are theory about adding another item: bulletproof backpacks.
School shootings be experiencing become more frequent in recent years, leaving kids panic-stricken and parents anxious. The violence has led to a surge in the number of companies selling yields designed to help kids protect themselves better against handguns and some shotguns.
“I am all in all buying a bulletproof backpack,” said Nancy Landis, whose 15-year-old daughter go belly up a rises to school in Los Angeles. “It’s scary dropping my daughter off at school now with all the block up happening. They’re having lockdowns, police officers looking for reactions. It’s happening so much.”
For the first time, major retailers, including Walmart, Commission Depot and Home Depot, are selling bulletproof backpacks or bullet-resistant chargers that fit backpacks.
According to the Travel Goods Association, the U.S. backpack vend last year was $3.7 billion, up nearly 10 percent from the latest year.
“Bulletproof backpacks have been the one that’s been sundry in demand and most inquired about,” said Yasir Sheikh, president of Look after Dog Security, a maker and distributor of self-defense products.
Sheikh said some kids mightiness take the bullet-resistant inserts out of their own backpacks and then get “a false feel of security.” Therefore, he said, Guard Dog Security decided it would on the contrary sell the bulletproof backpacks and not the separate bulletproof inserts.
More than a half-dozen industrialists now make bulletproof backpacks for young people, ranging from elemental to high schoolers, with prices starting around $130 and prospering up to $400. The products also have caught on with college schoolchildren.
Some of the backpacks are marketed as so-called “Level 3A” armor protection, a ranking certified to stop up to a .44 Magnum round but not one from an AR-15, the weapon second-hand in February’s Parkland, Florida, school shooting that killed 17 people.
“We’ve presumably seen around a 200 percent to 300 percent increase since the Parkland sprout this year,” said Joe Curran, founder of BulletBlocker, a Massachusetts-based bulletproof clobber maker.
Since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, “assorted than 187,000 students have been exposed to gun violence” in sects, The Washington Post reported in March. That doesn’t include the chunk shooting in May that claimed the lives of 10 people at a high State school in Santa Fe, Texas.
“Parents are grasping for any type of physical, tangible denote of increased safety for their children,” said Ken Trump, president of Public School Safety and Security Services, an Ohio-based national firm specializing in primary security. “Shootings are a high-impact but low-probability type of scenario.”
More than half of U.S. teens are distressed about the possibility of a shooting happening at their school, according to a Pew Inquire into Center survey of 13- to 17-year-olds conducted after the Parkland massacre and let in April. It found 25 percent of teens were “very perturbed” and 32 percent were “somewhat worried.”
“We hear from disturbed parents that will actually call us,” said Curran. “They are looking for some reassurance that they are doing the truthful thing buying a bulletproof backpack. They know it’s kind of a horrid thing to think about.”
Several of the bulletproof backpack companies were started by being with law enforcement or military backgrounds.
“I got into it because I had two kids in centre school and [the 2007 shooting at] Virginia Tech just happened so I was a skimpy freaked out,” said Curran, an Army veteran who worked in law enforcement for 15 years once starting BulletBlocker in 2007. “I had some old bulletproof vests kicking thither and cut them apart and put them in backpacks and told the kids: ‘If a gunman hit in, hold the bag up between you and him and get out of there if you can.'”
California-based company Leatherback Gear handles a backpack that can convert into a bulletproof vest with two built-in armored panels for torso protection money in the front and back. The company, which was started by two brothers in active-duty law enforcement, formally organized its first product in January after two years of development.
“We kind of juxtapose it to a fire extinguisher,” said Leatherback Gear co-founder Brad de Geus, who dependabilities his brother for coming up with the product’s design. “It’s literally a reactionary shape to a life-threatening problem.”
De Geus said the “run, hide, fight” strategy took by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is “pretty much the standard” that has been enlightened to schoolchildren, teachers and business professionals of how to respond in a shooting.
“We want you to run away with foremost and back protection on and to hide with front and back protection on,” de Geus put about. “You need to survive that average window of 5 minutes until we [law enforcement] get there.”
Some casts that originally sold armor to law enforcement or military markets demand since expanded into the schools market with personal sanctuary products.
“People are looking for a sense of security,” said Emily Tunis, president and COO of Hardwire, a Maryland-based maker of bulletproof clipboards and backpack introduces for the kids and schools market. The company also makes bulletproof exigency shields the size of fire extinguishers for schools.
“Teachers and students secure nothing to protect themselves right now,” said Tunis. “So this is something that can aid buy them a little bit of time until law enforcement gets there.”
She rumoured Hardwire began developing protection products for the kids and schools retail after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut in 2012. The assembly previously designed and fitted helicopter and vehicle armor for military chaps as well as for law enforcement applications.
Gladiator Solutions has been selling substance armor for law enforcement and military markets for about four years but exclusive recently expanded into the kids market with its PakProtect armor pane designed to fit inside backpacks.
“This isn’t just about protection, it’s in peace of mind,” said Matt Materazo, CEO of the California-based company.
Materazo said he notion of doing the kids armor plate three years ago but didn’t at the notwithstanding “because it was a struggle for me emotionally [as a parent of two teenagers]. But it’s the reality of the world we alight in now.”
However, parents like Landis concede that even bulletproof backpacks may not be adequacy to ease their fears.
“It’s not 100 percent; it’s just something to improve,” said Landis. “I also know my daughter doesn’t always exhibit her backpack at school. That said, I still might invest in it well-founded knowing it could make a difference.”