Bulletproof backpacks have become a best-selling item in the wake of multiple mass shootings, The New York Times reports.
The backpacks, which usually cost from $100 to $200, sold out in multiple stores last year following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, according to ABC News 7 in San Francisco.
"The backpack is designed, first of all, to be a very stylish and nice-looking backpack," said Gabi Siboni, a former Israeli commando and the founder of ArmorMe, a personal defense company that sells bulletproof backpacks. "And it has panels that protect you against bullets. It will increase your survival chances."
University of Connecticut sophomore J.T. Lewis, who is running for a seat in the Connecticut State Senate, told the Times his mother bought him a bulletproof backpack before his freshman year at college. His younger brother, Jesse, was killed in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.
"We just had a mutual understanding," Lewis said of his mother, noting she did not have to say anything when she gave him the backpack.
"I don't know if it's going to have any effect," he added. "But it might if I get shot from behind."
"It's incredibly depressing," Igor Volsky, the director of the gun-control advocacy group Guns Down America, told the Times. "The market is trying to solve for a problem that our politicians have refused to solve."
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