It's the back-to-school accessory of the year. Some US schools are now mandating the use of see-through backpacks. For the new school year, there are still only a handful who have done this and they're generally located within the perimeter of recent massacres. In Flint (Michigan) – some 50 kilometers from Oxford High School, where a high school student killed four students, in November 2021 – all backpacks were banned last year. Since the start of the new school year, from kindergarten to secondary school, only transparent bags are allowed.

It's the same situation in the Dallas (Texas) school district. After the shooting at Robb d'Uvalde Elementary School, 500 kilometers away (19 children and two teachers were killed, in May 2022), the transparent backpack was imposed from middle school onward. This year, the measure applies from kindergarten onwards. After all, in January, in Newport News (Virginia), a first-grader did shoot his teacher, seriously wounding her.

Obviously, opaque bags don't kill students, but transparent models are being presented as a compromise designed to facilitate the work of school security teams, without the need to install metal detectors or ban school bags altogether. The objective is to combat firearms, with school shootings rising from 34 in 2013 to 305 in 2022, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database maintained by data scientist David Riedman.

The graphs in Riedman's database show that only 41% of shooters attended the school they targeted and that shootings often started in the school parking lot. "Transparent backpacks would therefore have no impact on most school shootings," said the expert, convinced that it's a matter of taking more preventative action.

In Florida, after the shooting at Parkland's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (17 dead) in February 2018, students had to switch to transparent backpacks for their return to class. This was even though the killer was no longer attending the school when he committed the massacre and his assault rifle would never have fit into a backpack, transparent or opaque. Faced with resistance from high school students and March For Our Lives activists ("March for Our Lives" was the name given to the March 24, 2018 demonstrations calling for greater gun control in the United States), who wondered whether they were being mocked, the measure has since been dropped.

While it is difficult to prove that transparent backpacks serve a purpose, it is also difficult to say that they don't either. "They're not yet widespread enough for their usefulness to be rigorously measured," pointed out Jaclyn Schildkraut, director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

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