The entrepreneurs who are part of the booming school safety industry face a cruel irony: they are dependent on the uniquely American epidemic of school shootings.
“Every time there is a shooting, we see an uptick in business,” says one, featured in the new HBO documentary Thoughts and Prayers, who sells bulletproof wall art and skateboards. “Every time there is a tragedy, it economically benefits my family. That’s not what I wanted. We could be a $300 million company by the time this documentary airs.”
There are, as the documentary shows, bulletproof desks that can double as shields, blackout shutters to block visibility into classrooms, and video game simulations that test how teachers respond to a fake threat of a school shooter. The school safety industry has become an estimated $4 billion juggernaut, aided in part by a $1 billion infusion from Congress in 2022 to support mental health services and infrastructure upgrades, instead of meaningful gun reform.
Despite the documentary’s critique of the American gun culture that has given rise to mass shootings, political debates and depictions of gun violence are absent from the film. Instead, there are sit-down interviews with teachers reluctantly learning how to shoot guns and kids learning to live with the looming threat of mass shootings. The filmmakers were also present for lockdown drills and a highly realistic mass casualty simulation at a school district in Oregon that included volunteer students portraying gunshot victims. For co-directors Jessica Dimmock and Zackary Canepari, the goal of making the documentary was to “look at what people are trying to do” to combat mass shootings, Dimmock told me, “and ask the audience to consider whether or not this is going to work. And do we want to live like this?”