Andy Gill
Does bullet proofing school materials unnecessarily contribute to the hysteria surrounding school shootings?
It’s not just backpacks as many schools have now created policies prohibiting youth to bring backpacks inside of school facilities…
Not to show my cards but, what I’m implying here is that it’s irrational to be afraid of a school shooting. And, essentially what I’m asking here is whether or not it’s dangerous for others to commodify mass shootings?
As psychopathically-crazy as it might sound, would this encourage businesses to continue to drive fear into the parents and students lives in order to sell more products?
As we see in these Google Trends when school shootings take place and mass hysteria rises the sale of these bulletproof backpacks spikes… Vice News reports that these bulletproof items are being sold not just online but within “major retailers such as office Depot…”
There’s our perception and then there’s reality, right?
Because, a student is more likely to face a life-threatening injury from school sports than die in a school shooting; as a matter of fact, these backpacks should’ve been sold during my youth as during the 90’s we were 4x’s more likely to die from school shootings than students today…
Compare that to the likelihood of being struck by lightning as the National Geographic says that, “The odds of becoming a lightning victim in the U.S. in any one year is 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1 in 3,000.”
I’d argue that, within our upper-middle-class suburban American schools, sending one’s child to school with a bulletproof backpack, folder or binder is possibly more damaging to their psyche than not… As, the one of the high school students being interviewed in the video, Jack, in which these two above images are from, is so far convinced that he’s in danger speaking in the plural saying that, “Schools are dangerous places now…” 
Just to reiterate, in the 90’s we were 4x’s more likely to be killed in a school shooting…
Again, this is why I’ve been so far against the utilization of minors to push forward a political agenda.
A vast majority of us as adults don’t fully understand the workings of politics and meta-data that goes into their marketing campaigns… so, how could we expect, still hopefully-naive, minors to understand the idea of coercion, manipulation, and finance?
All in all, unless you live in an area that similar to parts of inner-city Chicago where homicides have surpassed the death toll of American special forces in Iraq then, you’re really not purchasing safety so much as you’re paying for the feeling of safety…
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