A young girl walks into her kindergarten classroom wearing a unicorn backpack that’s prepared to protect her against AR-15-style and AK-47 rifles. She sits at her bulletproof desk as her teacher encourages each student to be like “Tank the Turtle” and hide in their “shells” should there be a need.

Bulletproof backpacks and desks aren’t the only commonalities rising across schools—-many classrooms across America now contain collapsable class shields, bulletproof handheld shields, bulletproof ring binders, bulletproof glass, and bulletproof clipboards, which are collectively known as the rise of “bulletproof classrooms” currently sweeping the nation. 

Since 2023, the Minnesota legislature, like many other states, has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into increasing classroom safety measures, rightfully unsettled by these facts.

While the recently proposed SF 2480 may put in more secondary protective measures, it demonstrates the lengths representatives will go to avoid attacking the root of the problem: guns.

Bulletproof classrooms fail to attack the disease that is school gun violence; they only treat the fatal and menacing symptoms resulting from the immense lack of gun regulation in America. Without proper gun control, learning in constant fear is the school experience students are forced to accept.

School gun violence is not a rarity in America; it’s an unsettling continuum that’s expanding rapidly. School shootings increased by over 55% over two years (2020–2022), and the 2023 shootings well surpassed the “record high” that was 2022. 

No school is ever truly safe, even Edina High School. Although Edina’s violent crime rates have always been low in comparison to the average suburb, only just over a year has passed since a Snapchat video of a teen parked outside the Main Office holding a gun circulated throughout the student body.

Other states fight fire with fire: 10 states allow (and encourage) teachers to carry handguns to protect students in an emergency. Nearly 25 states permit school “individuals” to carry guns, with the definition of “individual” being painfully vague; there is no specified minimum age and nothing specifying whether or not visitors in the school qualify as “individuals.”

Bulletproofing classrooms in Minnesota is an act of desperation, a way to dodge the elephant in the room. Fingers crossed they will be effective. 

Likewise, if we can no longer avoid addressing gun violence, we accept it as a “fact of life,”  stated Vice-Presidential candidate JD Vance while discussing the recent Ohio shooting, where a 14-year-old open-fired in a Georgia high school and killed four people. Bulletproof classrooms are the perfect leeway for us to write gun violence off as a “fact of life,” normalizing the violence that will continue to ravage schools nationwide.

Through bulletproof classrooms, teachers carrying firearms, and drills with “Tank the Turtle,” we bandage the sore without sterilizing it, denying that it will soon reopen. We cover the cut but refuse to take away the blade.

As a Minnesota student attending a public school, I refuse to accept that walking into school with constant paranoia of gun threats is a “fact of life.” A majority of states including Minnesota still have no prohibition on the sale of military assault weapons. Minnesota also does not have “no gun” mandates on college campuses, school threat assessment teams still have not made their way to our state, and local towns and cities still have control over their gun safety laws—many of which are far from adequately restrictive.

Legislatures across America need to wake up: Guns are so poorly regulated and so out of control that kindergarteners are using their homework folders as body shields. Instead of politicians protecting their citizens, five-year-olds strap their bulletproof backpacks on and pray to return to their families at the end of the day. No precautionary efforts will be nearly as effective as controlling the weapons causing the harm, yet schools proceed to barricade windows, design safe rooms, and pump money into industrial-strength desks. 

All I wonder is how many more kids must die before we nab the source?

This piece was edited on October 11, 2024.