Somewhere in Aroostook County, in a farmhouse without electricity, Amish workers are making bullet-resistant backpacks.

Their boss, Jeffrey Maguire, is an Army veteran turned personal protection-for-hire. He is earnest when he says that these bags are the brilliant, missing key to classroom safety in Maine.

His efforts are not guided by profit, he says, but by a desire to save lives.

“Unfortunately, I feel that our politicians and school leaders are not taking the issue of school violence seriously enough,” Maguire wrote in an email. “They often blame the problem on guns time and again without offering real, actionable solutions. Mundbora body shields are that solution.”

Maguire has convinced so far just one civic leader in Maine to buy them.

He has no examples or case studies of situations in which a product like his has saved lives, and some experts have questioned their effectiveness.

In photographs, Maguire, 60, sports a dour complexion. 

It often lurks conspicuously from under a Gatsby cap in the background of photos of celebrities including Rihanna, a longtime client. (He was the bodyguard flamed on the internet in January when he inadvertently let a door close on the A-list popstar).

He says he’s worked for rock band Linkin Park and the Saudi royal family and that he spends two weeks of every month in Paris providing security for another client he wouldn’t name.

These credentials, he says, lend credence to his theories on school safety.

“If they trust me to protect them, the teachers and the parents and the communities that I’m reaching out to with this device can trust me as well. I know what I’m talking about,” he said.

Mundbora body shields’ unique (and patented) feature is a set of horizontal straps on the back panel, what he calls a “strategic strap configuration,” that allows a user to slip it over their forearm and strike a defensive pose. Maguire sources the bullet-resistant pads that fit inside the bags from an Arizona company, Armored Republic.

Though Maine has low rates of gun-related injuries and deaths, Maguire is attuned to violence in the world through his line of work and says this product was born out of that experience.

Maguire served in the Army in the 1980s, and reenlisted after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. His grandfather, a hunter, had always talked about Maine, and in 2012, Maguire purchased land near Grand Isle, in Aroostook County. Five year later, Maguire bought a home in Houlton and moved there in 2018 with his wife and youngest daughter.

While driving through Aroostook County one day, he spotted an Amish carriage.

“It just came to me,” he said. “The Amish make everything by hand. Maybe I can find somebody who can make bags.”

He launched Mundbora in 2019. The Maine Technology Institute gave him a $25,000 grant to scale up production in 2024.

Maguire declined requests to visit his production facility, citing the wishes of the family he employs.

Reuben M. Schafir is a Report for America corps member who writes about Indigenous and rural communities for the Portland Press Herald.