Armor plate for student backpack?

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@Armybrat good luck in finding bullet proof backpacks for your grandchildren. With the recent events I can't blame you. I am also certain that your grand babies are afraid.
We owe it to our children to make them safe. We put up fences around swimming pools. We make kids wear helmets and pads when riding bikes and skateboards. We teach them to not play outside in lightning storms.
As gun owners we need to be the leaders in stopping these senseless shootings.
 
We are discussing school children right? In my experience most young children and even some older children shut down or freeze when experiencing stressful situations. I realize that we all want to protect our kids to the greatest level that we can. Loading them down with plates and medical supplies to treat trauma although may seem prudent might be mentally damaging. I believe that teaching our children to be situationally aware. We do it when we teach kids to hunt or fish. Be looking all the time. The more they pay attention the better prepared they can be to react preemptively to anything that could threaten them. The more they are aware of the kids around then the more likely they are to recognize when some kid is behaving “weirdly or making threatening or scary comments “. Maybe having a real current day events conversation with your kids exploring their experiences at school might be helpful. Training kids to be able to survive is never a bad thing, but that alone not enough. Harden the school and restrict entrance. Provide a real path to get peoples who need mental treatment the help they need and the community the protection we deserve. Make it clear through policy and law that anyone who invaded a school, church, hospital, ect with intention to kill will be dealt with through the use of deadly force. We have to correct this scourge on a societal level or we will continue to have to suffer the trauma.
 
@Armybrat good luck in finding bullet proof backpacks for your grandchildren. With the recent events I can't blame you. I am also certain that your grand babies are afraid.
We owe it to our children to make them safe. We put up fences around swimming pools. We make kids wear helmets and pads when riding bikes and skateboards. We teach them to not play outside in lightning storms.
As gun owners we need to be the leaders in stopping these senseless shootings.
No, my grandson (he just turned 12) isn’t scared at all. His dad & I are merely being proactively cautious, just like the majority of posters here are by carrying arms for self protection.
I know how infinitesimal the odds are of being even near a mass shooting, but I myself was present as a student when Charles Whitman conducted his sniper massacre from the University of Texas Tower in August of 1966. So from that firsthand personal experience I know it can happen.
As a result, I don’t care what the skeptics here think or say in their attempt at rebuttal, as having stepped over multiple pools of my fellow students’ blood made quite an impression on me.
However, I do not live in fear, but think it is wise to be prepared.
Both the wife & I carry rolls of TP in our cars…. Just to be prepared for that possibility too. :D
 
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If you want something that's lightweight, get some ballistic ceramic plates. I believe Hescoe makes ceramic plates. Ceradyne as well but I don't think they do civilian sales. Hescoe does though.
 
As a result, I don’t care what the skeptics here think or say in their attempt at rebuttal

Fair enough.
But indulge me one more point here as someone who works with hundreds of kids in schools and is all over campus all day long. In my daily travels doing such, I often pick up lost items including backpacks. As part of that process, I open them to check for names in order to return them. If I found one full of armor plates and advanced first aid gear, I'd have to report it as unusual. The intent of those items being on campus might not be fully clear.
 
Have you ever been in a large building, with lots of hallways, when gunshots go off? I have. As part of our active shooter training at work, our court security team fired off blanks in different parts of the facility so people could familiarize themselves with what gunfire actually sounds like.

Every school I've ever been in has had a very simple floor plan. a couple of main hallways and the rooms off them. it wouldn't be too hard to figure out generally where a shot came from
 
A bag full of books should work about as well as anything else that is practical to carry.

train them to run fast from death/danger events and not look back. Forget what everyone else is saying and or doing, shelter in place my @$$.

Not all school shootings are the same. There is a time to run, and a time to stay in place. At Sandy Hook, and in Texas all of the shootings were contained to one room. The kids in those rooms had no chance to run with a shooter blocking the only exit. But in both cases the shooter was unable to access other rooms. Sheltering in place worked for everyone else and contained the shooter making it easier to get them. 500 kids running down a crowded hallway is a pretty easy target.

There have been shootings where the shooter pulled fire alarms in order get kids into a crowded hallway. This was the case at Marjorie Stoneman in Florida. It also allowed the shooter to drop his rifle, blend in, and run out of the building and temporarily escape. There was a shooting in Arkansas a few years ago where one kid pulled a fire alarm to get kids outside, then another opened fire.

The fear is that a better organized shooting with multiple shooters at various exits after a fire alarm is pulled. Many schools no longer exit when fire alarms are sounded. They immediately lock down until there is a coded announcement over the intercom. The principal saying the alarm is real is a dead giveaway that he is being held hostage. Only the teachers know the code word to really exit and it is changed often.
 
Sad state of affairs when we need to even start a thread like this. Armour, clotting agents. Geez, is this Ukraine schools we're discussing?

It could be. Ukraine would have been well served to have armor, clotting agents, and personal arms prior to the Russians invading.

Maybe schools should be built with a secondary purpose of civil defense shelters equipped with medical supplies, emergency rations, and the ability to actually resist siege for some appreciable amount of time.

They don't need to be built as prisons, but maybe more like fortresses. Prisons keep people in. Fortresses keep people out.
 
Just in general and as a matter of safety, telling your kids to ignore adults at their school is a bad idea. We do lockdown, fire and (where I'm at), earthquake drills for a multitude of reasons but primarily to get kids and staff used to a procedure and following directions is a huge part of that. Being someone who's in charge of kids in these situations, it doesn't sound particularly useful or appealing to me to have kids scrambling to retrieve armored backpacks or whatever instead of listening and keeping calm.

And for the record, part of our lockdown drill is once the door is closed/locked, it's locked for good.

Same here. But to make it worse. My classroom has no exterior windows or doors. Further, it is trapezoidal shaped and is intentionally designed so that there is nowhere in the room that can not be viewed through the hallway windows. It was only about two years ago that we got a superintendent that allowed me to put up curtains. If a student did run out of my classroom, there is quite a distance to cover before they would get to an exterior window or door.
 
would like some guidance to purchase same for my middle school grandson.

Don't bother. He won't carry the extra weight. That's the problem with these "armor backpack" ideas. Kids won't carry them. More, packs change so often (almost every school year) that you would need to continuously update them annually.

Better to not spread baseless fear to the child considering that while terrible and catastrophic he's more likely to be hurt in a bus wreck on a school trip than shot in a school mass shooting.
 
It could be. Ukraine would have been well served to have armor, clotting agents, and personal arms prior to the Russians invading.

Maybe schools should be built with a secondary purpose of civil defense shelters equipped with medical supplies, emergency rations, and the ability to actually resist siege for some appreciable amount of time.

They don't need to be built as prisons, but maybe more like fortresses. Prisons keep people in. Fortresses keep people out.

There are only about 131,000 pre college schools in the US. Won't take much to convert them, right?

FYI, Fortresses also keep people in and prisons also keep people out.

Better to not spread baseless fear to the child considering that while terrible and catastrophic he's more likely to be hurt in a bus wreck on a school trip than shot in a school mass shooting.

True, much more likely to be injured in a school bus than in a mass shooting, AND, potentially more likely to be killed in a school bus than in a school mass shooting.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/road-users/school-bus/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States

The difference is that apparently people are much more comfortable with children being injured and killed unintentionally (bus crashes) than they are with them being killed intentionally (mass shootings). It is an interesting mentality.
 
No, my grandson (he just turned 12) isn’t scared at all. His dad & I are merely being proactively cautious, just like the majority of posters here are by carrying arms for self protection.
I know how infinitesimal the odds are of being even near a mass shooting, but I myself was present as a student when Charles Whitman conducted his sniper massacre from the University of Texas Tower in August of 1966. So from that firsthand personal experience I know it can happen.
As a result, I don’t care what the skeptics here think or say in their attempt at rebuttal, as having stepped over multiple pools of my fellow students’ blood made quite an impression on me.
However, I do not live in fear, but think it is wise to be prepared.
Both the wife & I carry rolls of TP in our cars…. Just to be prepared for that possibility too. :D
I have 2 sets of med/sm ceramic plates that weren't doing much of anything in my vault and I kicked around the idea of sewing one of the medium plates into my daughters backpack. It made perfect sense to me, and wouldn't weigh more than an extra book and 99% of kids schoolwork these days is done on a laptop anyway, so totally manageable in my view.

I knew there wasn't a strong likelihood that she'd ever need it, just figured that as her dad, maybe having a ballistic shield in case of emergency wouldn't be a bad thing and it isn't a safety risk to anybody else so why the heck not, the only risk involved is possibly having a "concerned" faculty member make a phone call in the event it was discovered. I never did get around to doing it, but I wanted to. I think my wife gave me kind of a cross eyed look, like she didn't even want to think about the possibility but other than that, it certainly doesn't hurt to err on the side of caution and give your kid a lil added protection.

If you have the means to do it and it's not illegal to do so, I don't see any drawbacks to it. We all of us here carry or keep guns for an event that will likely never happen and/or to pursue an interest, I don't see how this is any different really. If you want to do it and you're not breaking the law, why not if for no other reason to give you a lil added peace of mind. Provided you're not blowing the kids back out and weighing him down with 10+lbs of AR500 steel plates......
 
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There are 131,000 schools, with a lot of them built on the cheap. They obviously cannot be replaced all at once, but a lot of them can be upgraded for better security, and new schools can be better designed.
 
There are 131,000 schools, with a lot of them built on the cheap. They obviously cannot be replaced all at once, but a lot of them can be upgraded for better security, and new schools can be better designed.

Any building can be renovated. It is only a matter of cost. They can ALL be upgraded to better security...depending on how much folks are willing to spend, right? Of course, it depends on how much upgrading you want to do, be it just installing better doors and door frames along with bullet resistant windows.

Then there are the hundreds of thousands of portable (expansion) classrooms, about 300k or so https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_classroom Security-wise, they are pretty much just garbage when it comes to ballistic protection. These were built because school districts didn't have the money for actual brick and mortar construction, often done as a temporary fix and then become permanent solutions to increased student populations.

The point here is to question where all the money is going to come from for all of these security upgrades and rebuilds when the money wasn't there in the first place.

You mentioned building fortresses to protect the students. How much do you think a "fortress" school would cost over the cost of a normal brick and mortar school?
 
Well, of course it needs to be paid for. As much as I hate to suggest it, make the Feds.and the State governments pay it. They're the ones pushing for compulsory education, and who have ruined free market education.

Inspect and evaluate schools and determine which ones can get by with upgrade which ones cannot easily be secured.

Upgradeable schools get 200-300K dollars for upgrades over 2-3 years.

Schools that cannot feasibly be upgraded to some acceptable level get put on schedule to be replaced. Have a few designs for different sizes and standardized components. Have these built or overseen by Army Corps of Engineers and National Guard. Use prefabricated concrete or pre-fab concrete forms to keep costs down.
 
In my experience most young children and even some older children shut down or freeze when experiencing stressful situations.

I think a majority of adults do too. Why, even as children being taught CPR, they are told to pick a single person and say “You, call 911”. If you just yell, “call 911” everyone stands there watching.
 
I don’t think that finding the funds to pay for upgrades are that hard to do. You just have to put the right focus on where tax dollars are now being spent. I read in earlier part of this thread that there are 131,000 schools. I wouldn’t think that all would fail the minimum standards we should be able to agree on as a safe school. If we look at the ones that need to be hardened the most say 25% and spent up to $1,000,000 on upgrading that would be billions less that we sent to Ukraine this year. We can and should place a higher priority on not only protection for out children but also teaching them how to think for themselves and not what to think so as to benefit one particular political ideology. Next year we an and should budget for American children first.
 
Not just Ukraine. Dozens of nations that dont deserve jack squat from us.

Theres tons of money to put electric locks and key card readers on every school door on america.

Out corrupt evil politicians would rather groom our children into sex slaves. Never before has America been controlled by a greater evil.
 
Well, that took a left turn………maybe the resident mod will do some more cleanup and reopen this, but for now……..
 
Well, that took a left turn………maybe the resident mod will do some more cleanup and reopen this, but for now……..

I deleted a bunch of off topic and useless posts. The OP is looking for something specific, so please answer the question if you can help.

Na, it can stay closed. I already did the whole clean up and ask nicely to stay on topic thing...
 
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