A middle school teacher in Muscatine, Iowa has created a mechanism to thwart would-be school shooters that is so deceptively simple it just might work.
The teacher is Daniel Nietzel, reports local NBC affiliate KWQC.
Like any great American inventor, Nietzel turned his inspiration into reality in his basement using some stuff he had around the house.
“I found the top of a Rubbermaid container and measured out geometrically the shape I needed and cut out five pieces,” Nietzel told KWQC. “Then I got out the hot glue gun and on my work shop table in the basement, hot glued it, and let it dry.”
And voila! “The Sleeve” was born.
It’s an amazingly simple product. As the name implies, it’s a v-shaped sleeve. It fits quickly and snugly over that v-shaped metal arm above a typical door to a school classroom. Once it’s attached correctly, The Sleeve can absorb up to 600 pounds of force — and keep the door closed.
Nietzel’s company, Fighting Chance Solutions, has already made sales in 22 states in the few weeks it has been in existence. Schools have purchased The Sleeve, obviously. So have corporations, hospitals and military units.
“We designed this with schools in mind, but we really are seeing it branch out into other areas as well which is exciting,” Nietzel told the NBC station.
He said he has decided to take time off from teaching to focus full-time on his new invention for at least the next several months.
The Sleeve is also made in America, as it happens. A local company, Fabricators Plus, is currently producing the brutally simple door stopper at a clip of 6,000 per week.
School shootings have, of course, been a sad part of the American landscape for a few decades now.
Last month, CNN drastically revised a claim it made which purportedly showed that 74 school shootings have occurred in the U.S. since the Sandy Hook massacre in Dec. 2012.
The basis for the claim was a graphical map from a pro-gun control group, Everytown for Gun Safety. (RELATED: CNN Slashes School Shooting Stats Claim By 80 Percent)
Everytown for Gun Safety, which is backed by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, headlined its graphic “School Shootings in America Since Sandy Hook.” The graphic suggested that the shootings it listed were similar in kind to Sandy Hook.
Charles Johnson, a freelance journalist, first began looking into the shooting incidents cited by Everytown for Gun Safety. After cross-referencing all the incidents listed by Everytown with local news reports, he claimed that only seven of the 74 shootings were what he would consider classical cases of school shootings similar to the one at Sandy Hook, which involved a lone, crazy killer, Adam Lanza, gunning down people with little or no discrimination.
For example, one 2013 shooting in San Leandro, Calif. was related to a dice game, Johnson found.
Others included a public suicide, shootings related to gang activity, a dispute over a Nintendo Wii video game console and a lovers’ spat involving a high school principal.
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