In response to the Columbine shootings in 1999 as well as the recent attack at Virginia Tech, two dads came up with an “interesting” solution to protect their own kids and are now marketing it to others — the bulletproof backpack:

“It was after seeing what happened in Columbine that we started thinking about this. I’m a parent and so is [co-owner] Joe [Curran] and we wanted a way of keeping kids safe at school and this is what we came up with,” said [Mike] Pelonzi, co-owner of MJ Safety Solutions which produces ‘My Child’s Pack’.

The backpacks, which will cost $175, have a super-lightweight bullet-proof plate sewn into the back which weighs no more than a bottle of water. Pelonzi said the material used is a secret.

The plate material meets National Institute of Justice safety standards, said Pelonzi, and during a three-year testing phase, stood up to bullets as well as machete, hatchet and Ka-bar knife attacks.

Good to know my kids will be safe from the all-to-often hatchet attack. Doesn’t this seem, I don’t know, a bit overboard? While school shootings are widely publicized when they happen, they are still a rare phenomenon. Why not send your kid to school with bear repellent, too, since they have as much chance of being attacked by a grizzly? What’s next, Abercrombie & Fitch full body armor? This takes helicopter parenting to a whole new level.

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Can I admit to you that I am terrified of raising a daughter?

When a man breaks into a Denver classroom, chases out the boys, binds and sexually assaults the girls before shooting them–when another man breaks into an Amish one-room schoolhouse (apparently because it would be easy) and forces the boys out to bind and slaughter girls–then I think of Casey’s post at Expectant Waiting:

If my daughters are lucky, they’ll grow up with a vague awareness of the hate that surrounds them.

If they’re unlucky, a man will bust in on their classroom, rape them, and execute them.

And just in case I think I’m safe here, with those killings so far away, I will read about two boys in my own town who pinned a twelve-year-old girl to the ground and set her on fire with lighter fluid–as a lark.

I want to keep Frances safe; I also want her to be a full and self-confident person who will fearlessly find and demand her own place in the world. I can’t do both. It makes me crazy.

Finding an acceptable level of risk is, for me, the hardest part of this motherhood thing so far. According to some, no level of risk is ok: I’ve seen newspaper articles instructing parents not to use mechanized baby swings (they can trigger frenzied rages in dogs and cats, apparently), to bolt televisions to the stands, and to stay within arm’s reach of your children in a swimming pool or lake at all times. This seems extreme, but certainly by not doing these things I am accepting a slightly increased risk of harm.

This is hard enough–when I feel like I can assess the information and the probabilities and make a reasonable and informed choice–but hate? How do I control for hate? How do I assess the chances and outcomes of hate? I can’t. I can’t, and short of locking her in the basement (which would surely be more harmful to her than almost anything the world could do) there’s nothing I can do. Somehow, someday soon, I’ll have to open the front door and let her walk through it on her own, to find friends and make choices and work and build a life and possibly confront hate and be gunned down by a madman with a grudge against girls. Or lit on fire by her friends. I don’t want her to fear the world, so I will hold the door open for her with a smile.

And work, work, work my whole life against the hate that makes the world dangerous for her.

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