“I’m just going to put in one bang stick” he said, sliding a single .357 Magnum cartridge into the revolver’s cylinder.

Jeffrey Maguire, founder of the Houlton-based manufacturer, envisions a world where one of these bags waits in every classroom across the state.

They are, he says, “the missing piece” in school safety.

Maguire’s not trying to armor every student. He wants a single shield available for the adult who is likely to confront whatever danger might walk through the door.

A set of horizontal straps allow someone to slide the bag over their forearm and hold it in a defensive posture, like a knight.

“You want to get the kids behind you,” he said.

Boothbay Harbor schools received 105 of these body shields earlier this year.

But do they actually work?

THE TEST

To answer that question, the Portland Press Herald enlisted experts to fire at one of the tactical bookbags with weapons commonly used in school shootings — from a 9 mm handgun, all the way up to the most notorious, an AR-15-style rifle.

The newspaper bought a body shield computer bag from Mundbora, which retails for $150, and two bullet-resistant inserts (for separate tests) at a cost of $130 each. We tested them at a state training range in Warren that Markwith built during his 26-year tenure at the corrections department.

At 76, his hands shake just a little as he points the glimmering .357 Magnum revolver downrange and calls out a warning, cocking the hammer.

As he sights the backpack, Markwith stills his hands.

“Here we go. Fasten your seatbelt.”

BODY ARMOR AT WORK

The pads in Mundbora bags qualify as a type of soft body armor. They’re made of layers of cross-woven, high-strength synthetic aramid fibers.

Those layers can stretch and bend.

When shot, the person or material behind the armor is still likely to feel significant blunt force trauma and can even be burned when a bullet’s kinetic energy converts into thermal energy.

But critically, it will catch and deform projectiles up to a certain size and velocity. Stiffer, heavier material such as hardened steel can stop larger, faster-moving projectiles, but at the cost of mobility, weight and comfort.

The revolver jumped in Markwith’s hand as it went off.

He removed the casing from the cylinder and approached the bag. Behind the pierced canvas, the .357 Magnum’s expanding copper sheath was trapped between the pad’s layers, bent open like petals on a flower and nearly flattened against its lead core.

Earlier, the projectile from a 9 mm handgun had also embedded under the surface of the pad, failing to pass through it.

“That’s what you want,” Markwith said.

The medium-powered firearm is used more than any other in school shootings, according to the American School Shooting Study Database.

When dug out later, the round from that 9 mm handgun, while not designed to expand like the .357 Magnum, had deformed nearly to the point of unrecognition, like a soft eggplant smashed against a cutting board.

Behind the pad, a laptop bore the signs of the blunt force: an inch-deep dent with cracks spidering out.

Josh Lash, chief of the Waldoboro Police Department, was an officer in 2017 when he responded to a domestic violence call and was shot with a .380 round.

He was hit on his right side, over his ribs, in a spot where his body armor overlapped. It felt like getting smacked with a baseball bat.

Lash ended up with a 2-inch high welt and a burn from where the heat melted his synthetic shirt into the wound. 

He has no doubt that the vest saved his life. “That would’ve hit lungs, and I would’ve probably died right there that day,” Lash said.

WHAT IT’S SUPPOSED TO DO — AND LIMITATIONS

The National Institute of Justice, a federal agency that certifies body armor for law enforcement, has said it does not test bulletproof backpacks and therefore cannot recommend them. But the pads inside Mundbora backpacks are designed to meet the agency’s specifications for level IIIA, or handgun 2, ballistic body armor.

That means they should stop even high-powered handgun rounds while minimizing blunt force trauma, but are not intended to stop high-powered rifles.

Markwith shot the backpack with a lower power .22 caliber rifle; a moderate power 9 mm round from both a handgun and a rifle; and two high power handgun rounds, the .357 Magnum and a .44 Magnum.

After each shot, Peter Joyce would take the bag down off its hook and inspect the damage.

Joyce is a barrel-chested firearms trainer who spent over 25 years with Portland police, where he helped form the city’s SWAT team before founding a civilian training business.

He’d locate the welt formed where each round embedded somewhere within the armored pad’s 24 sheets of butter-yellow fibers and label it with a paint pen before returning the bag to its post for another round.

None of the rounds penetrated through the pad, but all left deep marks on the items behind it.

Markwith, Joyce and Maguire (who was not present during the tests) were not surprised by these results.

THE AR-15

Although AR-15-style firearms are infamous for being the weapon of choice in numerous high-profile mass shootings, less than one third of mass shooters used rifles, according to a database of incidents in the U.S. between 1990 and 2016. In school shootings specifically, that figure is even lower, with 9% of perpetrators using rifles.

The database period ends before the school shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, where gunmen killed 21 and 17 victims, respectively, using AR-15-style rifles.

While the lightweight, easily operable and exceedingly popular rifles are less commonly used by school shooters, studies support the logical conclusion that they are connected to a higher probability and number of deaths.

“Rifles and stuff get the press because it runs up the body count,” Joyce said.

Even though the bags are not designed to stop an AR-15 round, Joyce fired one into a fresh bullet-resistant pad.

There’s a tight “pop” of the gun going off, then a “ding” of the brass hitting the gravel.

“It went right through,” Markwith said from the sidelines.

A tight, discolored mark is visible in the yellow woven material where the round entered, and a centimeter-high volcano of fibers sticking out the other side where it left.

“ It shows you that this system is primarily for handguns,” Joyce said.

Given how commonly handguns are actually used in shootings, that’s not an unreasonable limitation on the bag’s capability, he acknowledged.

When he considers the efficacy of one bag in a full classroom, Joyce can sound skeptical.

“When you’re dealing with the active shooters, you want to prevent it from getting to that point,” he said.

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