Why Bulletproof Backpacks Are a Good Idea
We’ve come to this. The K-12 Florida Christian School in Miami is selling bulletproof panels for children to insert into their backpacks. Teachers will show students how to install these ballistic shields. You know, because mass shootings and ’Merica.
We have come to this, when schools need to outfit their students with bulletproof gear just to keep their students safe. This is the endgame for the National Rifle Association of America (aka NRA). It is guns everywhere. Schools, churches, hospitals, courthouses, bars. Everywhere.
In a recent interview on Fresh Air, journalist Mike Spies said:
So what you’ve seen over the last decade is a proliferation of legislation that has been enacted that has allowed people to carry firearms in places that they’ve never been able to carry before. That includes bars, churches, college campuses, day care centers, government buildings. That’s ultimately at the core of their agenda, is to normalize gun carrying in as many places as possible until it just becomes as natural of a thing to see in society as any other accessory that people carry around.
While the NRA wants to normalize guns everywhere via concealed carry laws—and it’s working very well legistlatively at the state level—gun ownership is steadily falling.
Source: Washington Post, 2016
Source: Pew Research Center, 2017
For the 69% of us who don’t wish to arm themselves we must live in fear of gunfights breaking out wherever we are. Remember that 20 children were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. At least 12 of the people wounded or killed last Sunday in Sunderland, TX were children.
Bulletproof backpacks are a good idea. They solve a problem that’s growing increasingly frequent. A problem that we’ve let a special interest organization create because of its hardline stance against any gun control legislation. A special interest group with only 5 million members (6% of all gun owners, or 1.5% of the U.S. population) who have control of the Republican Party.
From Spies again:
The NRA has become essentially an organ of the Republican Party. It doesn’t do anything for Democrats. It hasn’t for a long time. And the way it spends on election bears that out. It spends essentially all of its money, and quite a lot of money, trying to keep Republicans in power, putting new ones in power.
And how powerful is the NRA? Since 1998 it has spent $203.2 million on political activities. That includes direct contributions to candidates, contributions to political parties and PACs, lobbying, and outside spending. What’s outside spending? “Efforts expressly advocating the election or defeat of a clearly identified candidate.” Oh by the way, the NRA spent $30 million on Donald Trump last year.
In addition to money, the NRA can decide who wins and who loses. Here’s Spies talking about how a vindictive NRA lobbyist in Florida dealt with a lawmaker who let one of their sponsored bills die in committee:
After that happened, he was also — or as it happened, he was also in his final term as a lawmaker, and he was hoping to be appointed to, like, a circuit court in Jacksonville and was among the, you know, final three potential candidates for that position. And it seemed like he was actually the favored candidate for Governor Scott, and Marion Hammer, remembering what he did, put together a huge campaign in which many thousands of NRA members sent emails to Governor Scott telling him under no circumstances to appoint Charles McBurney to the circuit court judgeship. And very shortly after that happened, McBurney was not appointed to the circuit court judgeship. Someone else was. And it was directly — I mean, you could say directly because of what he did.
So there you have it. We’ve allowed an organization like the NRA make the United States of America a country where we need to send our children to school with bulletproof backpacks. Well fucking done.
P.S. For children in preschool, you can buy them bulletproof nap mats.
