[imagesource: National Safety Shelters]

American politicians, beholden to the NRA and terrified of implementing gun control measures that a majority of Americans support, come up with the wildest ideas to stop school shootings following each tragic event.

In the case of the Uvalde school shooting in Texas, which claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers, everybody started talking about doors once again.

Make sure school entry and exit points are better controlled and this will all go away.

Never mind the two AR-15 style weapons Salvador Ramos was able to legally purchase on his 18th birthday, despite the fact that he had threatened women, carried around a dead cat, and been nicknamed “school shooter” during the previous year.

If the government won’t take action, private business steps in with some rather unusual methods. Enter National Safety Shelters, based in Florida, and its bullet-resistant steel enclosures.

The Guardian reports:

John Corrado, vice-president of National Safety Shelters, says the company sees its shelters as a response to an intractable problem. “Obviously, the fewer the guns, the better. Because you can’t have shootings without guns,” Corrado says.

“However, we’ve recognized reality. With the type of government that we have and the difficulty in getting laws changed … guns are here to stay. So you have to do something to protect yourself from them.”

The company says that a class full of students can enter the shelter within a minute of an attack.

Constructed from “military-grade steel” and designed to withstand fire from “semi-automatic weapons like AK-47 and AR-15 rifles”, each classroom would be fitted with one.

America – the land of the free.

In 2019, the company installed the shelters in a school in Arkansas and has done several since.

This video from late 2019 is really surreal. Look how happy the young girl is at the 3:50 mark at not having to worry “about getting hurt or something”:

This video gives you a further look inside a shelter:

The ‘safety pods’ cost anywhere between $15 000 and $30 000 a classroom and also offer protection against hurricanes and other extreme weather conditions.

As images of the shelters have done the rounds on social media in the wake of what happened in Uvalde, there has been much condemnation that it has come to this.

Amy Klinger, a school safety expert and the director of programs for the Educator’s School Safety Network, told NPR the shelters are indicative of a much wider problem:

“The problem is that we tend to respond to events, like the tragedy in Uvalde, with a quick solution. Let’s do a quick fix. Let’s buy something really fast,” she said. “And we tend to look at something shiny and go, ‘Hey, let’s buy that thing.'”

…”So having a fancy mechanism wouldn’t have changed anything,” Klinger said of the Uvalde school shooting. “So I think that’s the problem with buying stuff. It makes people feel better, but it actually makes your school less safe because it creates the illusion of safety when you don’t really have it.”

She went on to say that these quick-fix measures are really just a way for companies to profit from the real fears that people have about the potential for a school shooting.

Meanwhile, those with the ability to actually enact change send out ‘thoughts and prayers’ after each deadly shooting and then slowly pick apart any legislature aimed at curbing the real issue.

[sources:guardian&npr]