The BStroy clothing brand faced major backlash after releasing school-shooting themed hoodies during New York Fashion Week on Sept. 15. 

 The schools included were Stoneman Douglas in 2018, Virginia Tech in 2007, Columbine in 1999 and Sandy Hook in 2012. To make matters much worse, the hoodies featured various circular details that resembled bullet holes.  

In a series of images posted on their Instagram page, the brand chose to promote the sweatshirts by featuring the ones that suffered the deadliest shootings. That’s right. They used the catastrophes of school shootings to make money. 

There are so many other ways to bring awareness to these shootings and gun control laws in our country, but creating a clothing line is not one of them. 

The “brains” behind the clothing line are Brick Owens and Dieter Grams, who founded the company back in 2012. The designers claim they were only looking to promote their brand, but the backlash they received through Instagram comments suggests otherwise. 

When the founders realized what they had done and the amount of hate comments they received, they didn’t apologize. Instead, they doubled down and said we need to face reality.

By living in Connecticut, many of us were personally affected by the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012; we remember the day it happened and how scared we were. Twenty innocent children between the ages of six and seven years old died in that shooting, and seeing people making profit of it is disgusting.

Yes, I understand that we cannot change what happened, but after these shootings occurred, nothing was done. No law was passed, no restrictions were made; no one faced the fatal issue that still continues today. And promoting this message on hoodies and selling them for money is definitely not the way to go. 

What the owners did was simply a business move and a strategy to promote the brand. Bstroy could have taken a different path and after getting all the attention and used all the awareness to promote gun laws and issues with guns in our society nowadays.