On the third day of school, Cecily King decided she needed to upgrade her middle schooler’s bulletproof backpack liner with one that could shield her from the rapid-fire rounds of an assault rifle.
This is what back-to-school shopping in America looks like.
The $300 insert is advertised as providing “military-trusted†protection for the “vital torso area†of a young child in the line of fire in a classroom. King, a dance instructor from Ballwin and mother of four, received emails and texts about a yellow-level threat that led to a two-hour lockdown at her daughter’s middle school on Wednesday.
“It was a very long two hours,†King said. The memories from last year’s school shooting at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School and Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience in ºüÀêÊÓƵ are still vivid. A 19-year-old armed with a Palmetto State Armory PA-15 rifle killed a teacher and a student, police said.
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Five of King’s students attended CVPA.
“They were jumping over bullets on the floor, running past a body,†she said. That’s when she decided to purchase the bulletproof backpack protection for her daughter. She and her husband also purchased a cell phone with a GPS tracking app for their daughter before the school year started. After the threat at the school this past week, King’s mother offered to split the cost of a new liner that can protect against automatic rifle bullets.
“It’s maddening. It’s sickening. It makes my stomach turn that in order to keep my kid safe in school this is what we have to do,†King said.
Shooters have used an AR-15 or similar semi-automatic rifles to massacre people in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, a high school in Parkland, Florida, a music festival in Las Vegas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee, an office party in San Bernardino, California, on the streets of Midland and Odessa, Texas, in synagogues near San Diego and in Pittsburgh, at a church service in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. There were more school shootings in 2022 — 46 — than in any year since at least 1999, according to maintained by the Washington Post. The paper has counted 386 school shootings since Columbine.
No other country in the world comes close to murdering its school children the way America does.
Sales for bulletproof backpacks soared last year after a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary school in Texas. He killed 19 children and two teachers.
In the aftermath, a equipped its schools with armored shields to try to protect students and teachers in the event of a mass shooting. Ostensibly, teachers are supposed to hide students behind the shields while herding them into corners of a classroom or outside the building. The armor shields were mounted next to fire extinguishers.
In the wake of the horror in Uvalde, Republicans pivoted to talking about ways to “harden†or fortify schools. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz talked about changing doors in schools. Anything to avoid mentioning the elephant in the room — the hundreds of millions of guns flooding America.
When ºüÀêÊÓƵ Mayor Tishaura Jones talked this past week about her effort to rein in the AR-15s on the city’s streets, gun lovers had the usual meltdowns about their “right†to conceal carry, to open carry, to buy on a whim whenever and however they want the very weapons used to terrorize and massacre our children. Any nation that makes guns more precious than its own children has lost its way.
Earlier in the week, a post in a moms’ Facebook group asked about the best way to track their elementary school-aged children. Moms swapped tips about the best surveillance and tracking devices. A few mothers said they use Apple Air Tags attached to their kids’ shoes and backpacks.
Our Republican lawmakers would rather see kindergartners covered in body armor, lugging bulletproof backpacks with GPS trackers planted in their sneakers than pass gun safety laws.
The GOP wants to harden schools.
They’ve already hardened their hearts.