Ryan Wilcox peered through his binoculars as a gunman fired at a large piece of glass propped up at a shooting range in the foothills of Utah’s Wasatch mountains.
Wilcox, a Republican state lawmaker charged with securing Utah’s schools, was eager to see if a polyester-based film, thinner than a credit card and applied to glass windows and doors, might answer a desperate nationwide query: How can schools stop attackers from shooting their way in?
During his two-day visit in Georgia, Czyz tried to get firsthand accounts. He waited outside a building where teachers were meeting until a school staffer called the sheriff to keep him away.
Czyz later posted on LinkedIn that he had completed a report from his team’s investigation. He sent emails to school administrators, architects and law-enforcement officials offering to make a presentation about his findings.
After a deadly school shooting in Nashville last year, Czyz concluded in another email blast that every district should act quickly to harden entryway windows and doors. The email also encouraged recipients to contact him for “exclusive pricing.”
Czyz said he wished the government would crack down on unscrupulous competitors making exaggerated claims about window-film protection. “It’s false advertising,” he said.
His company claims its window film has passed a “shooter attack test” completed by an independent testing company called FILTI and certified by the nonprofit National Safety and Security Protection Association. In marketing materials sent to school districts, the company said, “every other film sold is not going to protect you from someone with a gun.”
Both the testing company and the nonprofit share the same Syracuse, N.Y., address as Armoured One. Czyz acknowledged that he started both and that FILTI was an “in-house testing company” he used until he found an independent company to create a test he approved of. FILTI test results still appear in company marketing materials.
Hampton City Schools in Virginia recently completed an $847,000 window-film project with Armoured One after the district’s security supervisor James Bailey attended one of the company’s demonstrations. “We know that it’s not bulletproof film,” he said and noted that it wasn’t pitched that way. “We are trying to buy time if there was a serious incident.”
Unbelievable
Two dozen people gathered last month at a shooting range in San Bernardino, Calif., to watch Steven Johnson, president of Safe Haven Defense, demonstrate his window-film product.
He told the gathering of school district employees the story of how he left a full-time career as a police detective in Arizona to create a window film that, unlike others, actually stops bullets. “People aren’t going to believe what you saw here today,” Johnson promised the group.
With cellphone cameras pointed at him, Johnson first hurled a rock and then swung a metal baseball bat at a sample window. An employee crouched inches behind the glass. “I’m not going to ask you guys to protect your staff, your students, without me proving to you that I trust my film protecting my staff,” Johnson said. The glass shattered between the sheets of film but stayed in place and kept the bat from breaking through.
Next, he fired a handgun at another window and the bullets lodged in the glass. No employee had to brave the test. “You can actually pull out the entire piece of lead,” Johnson said, picking at the bullet.
Nathaniel Holt, the chief facilities officer for Compton Unified School District in Los Angeles County, had driven nearly two hours that day to see if the window film was suitable for a new high school under construction.
Holt stepped forward to get a closer look at the glass. “I’m sold,” he said. Safe Haven has grown nationwide in less than a decade with the help of its live demonstrations. The company displays its protection claim on its booth at conferences that draw school-safety officials and vendors around the U.S.: “A window film that stops bullets using your existing glass.”
Johnson tells school officials that his product does what others can’t do because of a proprietary method he developed. He claimed to have a patent for the method but later acknowledged he didn’t. Madico, a U.S. manufacturer, says it provides Safe Haven with a custom-made window film for layering into a thicker coat.
Jesse Manship, the technical service manager at Madico, said the manufacturer’s off-the-shelf products don’t stop bullets: “If somebody were to fire a projectile at a Madico film, our expectation is the bullet would travel through.”
Madico said Safe Haven conducted its own testing for the school-safety claims.
In demonstrations, Safe Haven uses three-eighths-inch annealed glass, which is thicker than the quarter-inch tempered glass typically used at schools. Annealed glass would break into large shards if struck by a bullet and would likely remain in the frame longer than tempered glass, which shatters into pebbles, according to window-glass experts.
The use of thicker annealed glass in the demonstrations might mislead school officials because it implies that “if you took a film and put it on the existing glass in your building, that you should expect the same sort of performance,” said Smith, of the International Window Film Association.
Johnson said they intentionally use annealed glass because it is weaker, an explanation that glass experts contend doesn’t make sense. If a school wants to see how the film would work, they said, they should see it demonstrated on the glass they have installed.
The window-film industry started in the 1970s to reduce energy costs and offer bomb-blast protection. It has since evolved into a shield against storms and intruders. “There is a valid opportunity here to save lives—to sell it as a delay for forced entry but not for stopping bullets,” said James Beale, the chief executive of NGS, a longtime window-film dealer in Canton, Ga. “All these schools are making plans around a ballistic film that doesn’t exist,” said Beale, who sells window film made by 3M.
Johnson of Safe Haven said he always explains his film’s safety limitations to customers: “Transparency, no pun intended, is everything,” he said, including the caveat that the film won’t stop two bullets if they are within 1.75 inches of one another.
A Safe Haven demonstration a few years ago persuaded Ronald Applin, the chief of police for Atlanta Public Schools. “We brought some guns, they brought some guns,” Applin said. “We shot it, and it worked.”
The district has begun applying window film in entryway vestibules at 76 district schools. Applin said the window film is part of a security system that includes call buttons to enter buildings, videocameras and panic buttons. “Parents do want a fortress,” Applin said, “but don’t want it to look like a fortress.”
