In the years leading up to the pandemic, protests and debates regarding the availability of guns to Americans reached a fever pitch in light of a string of high profile mass shootings that took place over the past decade.
But while there has yet to be a holistic conclusion to those debates, the matter seemed to fall in priority last year.
Instead, the nation had to split its focus between the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tumult of the 2020 Presidential Election, and the unprecedented growth of protests against police brutality and systemic racism among other concerns.
Yet as public resources and particularly schools opened up this year, the issue of how to address mass shootings has had some unfortunate reasons to rejoin the national conversation.
And as a short series of videos make clear, it seems the return of that issue has had some strange consequences for certain high school students in Idaho.
On September 25, a student in Rigby, Idaho uploaded a TikTok revealing that her school had recently banned backpacks.
According to KSL , this measure wasn’t just limited to one school, but rather all high schools and middle schools in the small city.
This move apparently came in response to an incident that saw a student bring a gun to Rigby Middle School four months after a shooting took place there.
As Jefferson School District 251 representative Monica Pauley said, “Elementary schools will still be able to have backpacks. We are doing this as a precautionary measure.”
But as we can see, that response has left students in the affected schools scrambling to figure out what they can use to carry their class materials.
And the two TikToks you’re about to see will show the wide range of unusual solutions the uploader’s classmates have found to replace their backpacks.
Although laundry baskets, wagons, and shopping carts seem to be popular choices, some of the options we see border on the comical.
Take for instance, the toy shopping cart we see in the cafeteria about halfway through the video.
And in its final moments, we can see that a particularly inventive student has crafted their own contraption made from a dolly and a milk crate.
In her follow-up video posted three days later, the uploader saw even more bizarre selections and commented, “This is getting ridiculous.”
This time, the objects students used to carry their stuff ranged from colorful toys to sleds to coolers with one student somehow cramming everything into a traffic cone.
It’s unclear when these students will be able to bring backpacks again or how far this idea will spread, but it at least seems like some students are using their senses of humor to make the most of a frustrating situation.
h/t: KSL
