A PRODUCT TO KEEP YOUR KID SAFE
WHAT’S better than a product that will blow you away?
It’s a product that will keep your kids from getting blown away.
Yep, it’s come to this – armor-plated backpacks.
As a sign of the times in modern America, a tiny Austin, Texas, company is just starting to sell a backpack insert made of bulletproof Kevlar material able to withstand the penetration of a .44-caliber bullet.
The ultimate in must-have back to school items – the Backpackshield BP 3A comes in 10 different colors, although three of them are variations of green.
None of them, notably, is blood red.
The manufacturer says the shield will stop round nose, full metal jacket and semi-wad cutter bullets (whatever the hell those are.)
The company will even let you decorate the shield with a picture. (Probably not a bull’s eye.)
What can I say?
Except that, after the thwarted attacks by a rifle toting student at St. John’s University last week and what happened at Virginia Tech – why not?
I can’t ever recall writing about a new product in this column.
The iPod didn’t get treatment like this. The Wonderbra wasn’t even this wonderful for columnizing (although I admittedly did think about it a lot.)
In fact there are thousands of product and business ideas that come across my desk each year.
But nothing – nothing – is like the Backpackshield, which can fit snuggly and unobtrusively into your kid’s Elmo bag.
“There’s a market for the peace of mind for people sending their kids off to St. John’s or Virginia Tech, or the school of tomorrow,” says Kerry Clark, president of Backpackshield Manufacturing, who says he also tests the security of weapons systems for the government.
Clark was in New York the day of the St. John’s incident showing off his product at a high-technology exhibit called ShowStoppers and was showcasing a Backpackshield with several bullets fired into it.
None penetrated.
A backpack is, of course by definition, on a kid’s back. So what if the attack comes from the front?
“You just swing it around,” says Clark.
“The whole idea is that it is high and long enough so you can take any of a number of positions where you can get your head and your heart behind the shield.”
“In theory, they will run out of bullets before any one will come through,” says Clark.
That’s comforting.
The Backpackshield – proving once again that necessity is the mother of intervention.