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Not often do products come along that are life changing and life saving. A Safe Pack although is definitely a product that in fact is life altering. Why do we say that? Because we experienced it for ourselves.
A few months ago we had the pleasure to interview the Founder and CEO of A Safe Pack, Carrie Gaines. She explained to us how and why she founded A Safe Pack, and it’s all about saving lives. She explained that she was watching TV on Valentines day in 2018 when she saw on her TV the news stories of the Parkland Florida Mass Shooting. This was in her home state of Florida. She was so worried about how to keep her own 2 children Safe at school as well as other children too. Her family has a military background so they are very familiar with body armor and how it does protect and save lives.
She went to work studying up about body armor and finding a company that makes the best she could find. They then came up with Tank the Turtle. She explained to me that not only getting children to want to use body armor, but also parents being comfortable with the idea of body armor for kids is not easy. That’s when they came up with the Mascot “Tank the Turtle.”
The idea being turtles are protected by their shells and kids can use this armor with a emblem of a turtle shell on it as their own protective shell. Carrie recalled going to meetings with law makers and school boards with her idea. And Tank the Turtle was a great ice breaker for the discussion. Helping all parties to ease into the discussion. Because let’s face it, people don’t want to talk about such things. It’s hard, really hard to come to grips with the reality we are in. Sadly there are bad people that want to hurt others, even some that want to hurt little kids. And we can sit back and expect our leaders to fix it. Or we can do something ourselves to protect the kids.
As Carrie and I discussed this I thanked her for being a person who said we need to do something to protect kids and then actually doing something. That’s a rare quality.
She has definitely put in the work and the effort in protecting kids that our children deserve.
She told me she wanted the armor to be able to handle AR-15 rounds because sadly many school shootings are being carried out by gunmen this this type of firearm. She learned that there are other shields on the market but they were only level IIIA. What does that mean? Level IIIA can only protect against hand gun fire and not rifle fire.
A Safe Pack’s plate is Level III, which means yes it handles rifle fire up to 7.62 caliber which is an AK-47 round. An other aspect of this shield Carrie wanted was she wanted it to be discreet. There are bullet proof backpacks out there but they can be easily identifiable if you know what you’re looking for. The A Safe Pack plate goes into any standard backpack and it weighs 3.2lbs, that’s like a text book weight.
These ideas make the A Safe Pack shield better at protecting children against high caliber rifles and being singled out for their backpack being one identified as a bulletproof one.
As Carrie and I discussed Torqued Magazine testing out the abilities of the Safe Pack Shield, she told me to give it everything we had. And believe me we did.
We decided a proper test of Tank the Turtles shell would to he start with lower sized caliber rounds and work our way up. We started with a .22 LR round, then a .380, next up a 9mm, followed by a 45 acp. Those were our hands gun rounds. We shot off at least 6 rounds of the 45 acp into the shield. Nothing made it through. At this point we had already put 9 rounds into the shield.
We then went for the rifles, starting with .223, then a .223 Hollow point and then a steel core 5.56. Was their damage, yes but only to the front. Nothing made it through. We even went up close approximately 15 feet and still no penetration by the rounds. This was nuts. At this point we tallied up the shots. We were now at 16 rounds into the shield and it still held strong. We then put 10 additional rounds into it from various guns. That’s right 26 rounds and it maintained its life saving attributes.
Well what else do we do. We pulled out the big boy. The AR500, with it’s 500 auto max round. And there went an additional 4 huge rounds into the shield. And crazy enough they did not go through the shield. Yes our huge, most powerful AR there is, didn’t destroy the shield. I also want to point something out here. If you’re keeping track this now tallies 30 rounds. Why is this significant? Well if you’re familiar with the high capacity magazines available for AR15’s they are 30 rounds. This tells me this shield can handle a full magazine of shots and possibly give a child time to run to safety as this would force a gunman to reload or change out magazines. I find that stat as a huge point.
The A Safe Pack shield lived up to, and beyond all of our expectations. I personally feel this product will save lives. Children need our protection. We buckle them up in our cars not expecting an auto accident but because there may be a small chance. Sending a child to school with safety in their backpack should be deemed the same way. We live in strange and scary times sadly. Why not give our kids a fighting chance?
Huge thank you to Carrie Gaines for the interview and the opportunity to prove this amazing product.
