Before his freshman year at the University of Connecticut, J.T. Lewis received an unusual gift from his mother: a bullet-resistant backpack.
Lewis, a sophomore at the university, comes from a family shattered by gun violence: His younger brother, Jesse, was killed in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. When his mother, Scarlett, gave him the dark-gray backpack, he said, she did not have to say a word.
"We just had a mutual understanding," said Lewis, 19, who is running for a seat in the Connecticut state Senate.
Now he wears the armored backpack on campus because it makes him feel safer, even if it means he sweats a little more under the bulky load.
As mass shootings become a tragic fact of life in the United States, it's not just the families of victims who are investing in protective gear.
A growing number of companies are offering bullet-resistant backpacks in back-to-school sales, marketing them to parents who are desperate to protect their children from gunmen.
"It's incredibly depressing," said Igor Volsky, the director of Guns Down America, a gun-control advocacy group. "The market is trying to solve for a problem that our politicians have refused to solve."
Demand for armored backpacks surged after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018. With back-to-school season approaching, the shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have renewed attention on the products.
In the past, some stores have reportedly sold out of the backpacks, which typically cost $100 to $200. Months before the Parkland shooting, a private Christian school in Miami sold protective panels that could be inserted into backpacks, charging $120 for the shielding.
This year, ArmorMe, a personal-defense company run by a former Israeli commando, Gabi Siboni, started selling a bullet-resistant backpack that can unfold into a larger covering.
"The backpack is designed first of all to be a very stylish and nice-looking backpack," Siboni said. "And it has panels that protect you against bullets. It will increase your survival chances."
Another company, Guard Dog Security, has been selling armored backpacks since shortly after the Sandy Hook shooting. The products are available at Office Max, Office Depot and Kmart, and the company recently released a model that costs less than $100.
"It could be the difference between life and death," said Yasir Sheikh, who runs Guard Dog.
In the past, companies have been criticized for falsely claiming that their armored backpacks were certified by the National Institute of Justice, which oversees the body armor used by law enforcement agencies. The agency, part of the Justice Department, has not certified, or even tested, the bullet-resistant backpacks and has no plans to do so, said Mollie Timmons, a department spokeswoman.
Still, Sheikh said, Guard Dog's backpack is designed to meet the agency's Level IIIA performance standard for body armor, which would make it resistant to bullets fired from shotguns and handguns.
But Sheikh acknowledged that the backpacks were less effective at blocking gunfire from powerful semi-automatic weapons, like the ones used at Sandy Hook. And gun-control advocates say there is no evidence that armored backpacks, however carefully tested, would keep children safe during a shooting.
SundayMonday on 09/01/2019