"Your child's safety; Your piece of mind, is our business." So reads an advertisement for BulletBlocker, a company selling bulletproof backpacks and other body armor for children. Since the tragic school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 children dead, BulletBlocker and other companies like it have seen a massive surge in demand for the bags. "I can't go into exact sales numbers, but basically we tripled our sales volume of backpacks that we typically do in a month — in one week," says Derek Williams, the president of Amendment II, which sells a variety of bulletproof backpacks for $300 each. The steep price and the opportunistic promotion of the bags has led some to accuse these companies of profiting from a national tragedy.
"With thoughts of defenseless children seared into the national consciousness, the company doesn't plan on letting the crisis go to waste," writes Tim Murphy at Mother Jones. Of course, Williams claims he just wants to keep kids safe. "We want to be sensitive to how we do that, but we are gonna try to get the word out that this product does exist," he says.
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