#HTE

Bulletproof and Natural-Disaster-Resistant Classroom Shelters

In 2013 a tornado ripped through the town of Moore, Oklahoma, leveling the Plaza Towers Elementary School. Seven children were killed in the destruction. Looking at both that incident and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, where 20 children and six adults were slaughtered with Bushmaster’s version of the AR-15, a Utah-based company called Shelter in Place was formed to design and install aftermarket safe rooms.

Following the recent spate of mass shootings, Shelter in Place’s products are being touted for their bullet resistance–“Each shelter is built with multi-layered, hardened ballistic steel that has been tested with every gun that has been used in a school shooting, and then some,” the company writes–and we’re seeing videos like these pop up:

This one focuses a bit more on the natural disaster protection:

The rooms are not cheap, coming in at a total of $400,000 for the six rooms installed at Healdton. That will place them out of the reach of schools with lower budgets.

These shelters would have saved lives during the Moore tornado incident, as the kids there had no place to hide. They also would have saved lives at Sandy Hook, where the shooter was entering classroom after classroom and firing. But they would not have been as effective during the Parkland massacre, as the shooter pulled the fire alarm in order to draw students into the hallway; there are also ugly, debated reports from at least one student that a teacher knowingly locked students out of a classroom in order to keep himself safe.

With the gun control “debate” effectively stalled, more solutions are going to be needed in order to protect children. It looks like it is going to be up to entrepreneurs, and not our political leaders, to devise them.

http://www.core77.com/posts/74270/Bulletproof-and-Natural-Disaster-Resistant-Classroom-Shelters