I’ve mentioned this in a few threads: there are around 99,000 public schools in the U.S. Imagine a couple of guards at each one and you might be talking about 200,000 people. Of course I don’t know if that would be sufficient for the many large schools around the country, but it’s a starting point. I don’t know what a good ballpark salary would be, but you’re well into the billions of dollars already. I think spending on school shooter prevention would end up costing about as much as the TSA. Everybody loves them and thinks they’re well wort the money, right?
You don’t have a point, as we established in one of the 20 other threads on the subject. Alcohol is just another in an endless line of distractions from the pro-gun people. It has no relevance to the discussion, AND we are working on the problem such that in our lifetimes there is an extremely good chance drunk-driving deaths will be eliminated.
So if you are interested in actually contributing to the discussion and coming up with a solution (instead of typical pro-gun obfuscation and misdirection), bringing up drunk-driving in every thread is not the way to go.
Hm…I would have thought it a lot more money than that. Not that the TSA’s annual budget is small or anything, but still…I was thinking hundreds of billions. Still, I think it’s unfeasible and unnecessary, though I’d prefer this to arming the teachers.
Unlike your interesting digression about magical auto-driving technology, ehe? 
Thanks for your input.
Well, I’m not imagining any spending on promotion or testing or regulations, increased pay with seniority, benefits, or for that matter their guns or equipment. Just paying the salaries for the 200,000 school security guards we’d be paying in the hope they would come in handy the couple of times a year that someone tries to shoot up a school. If they get $40,000 a year, that’s about $8 billion every year.
Or the capital costs of things like, perhaps, a video surveillance system (though a lot of schools already have this, I imagine that if you REALLY wanted to protect them you’d need to standardize and upgrade plus centralize them, as well as install them at the schools that don’t have them).
Even double your estimated costs though it’s a lot less than I was thinking though, if we are talking nation wide…my guestimate was like at least an order of magnitude off, maybe two. I STILL don’t think this is a problem that needs to be solved, but I admit that I dismissed this too quickly.
Still…who would paying for this? Is the NRA going to pay for it, or is it up to the states or local government…or the Federal government?
But at that cost what do we really think the effectiveness of such a thing would be?
I love how you use “magic” as your catchall dismissive motion. I assure you, it is only magic in the Arthur C. Clark sense. This is a reality, and legislature is already accounting for it. But by all means, keep calling it magic and acting like it doesn’t exist. It makes your stupid arguments even stupider.
Well, it would probably shut down the majority of these rare, random attacks…the people doing these things would shift to softer targets if they thought their heroic murders and dramatic suicides would be stopped with their ignominious capture and imprisonment, which probably wouldn’t be much fun (since most of these clowns are middle class white kids, and since even criminals aren’t keen on folks like this going into schools to shoot up little kids). So, for, say, $8 billion a year we’d prevent the relative handful of attacks that happen at schools each year or every couple of years.
No, it makes you seem obsessed. I’ve already addressed this, and already told you that if you want to discuss it make a new thread and I’ll be glad too..again…give my thoughts on the subject. The ironic part is that you accuse me of hijacking.
You’re the one who brings up alcohol in every thread, not me.
Never spent much time on an army base huh? The reason the spree was so “successful” was because there were plenty of good guys but no guns to defend themselves with. They keep them locked up except for security forces.
I doubt it would stop any such attacks. Schools are easy to get onto in many ways and any security would likely either be targeted first or simply avoided.
Yes, I do…and that’s because I have a point that is germane to the actual discussions going on with it. I realize that folks have attempted to handwave it away, or gone through histrionics about it, but I DO have a point that’s not a hijack. You, however, are obsessed with auto-piloted cars, which, today, are not reality, and thus are not going to be a factor in anything any time soon. That IS a hijack.
I realize it’s a subject that interests you, so, please, by all means, start a thread on it if you want to discuss it. It IS an interesting subject.
Your point is not germane. We are working on the drunk-driving problem. Unlike guns, nobody likes drunk driving deaths and we are trying to fix it. Now if we can get the same attention to gun deaths, I think we can all go home for the day.
It’s a risk/reward thing (I realize it’s distasteful to think of it this way, but I think that’s how many of the folks who do these things look at it, subconsciously at least). If you are wanting to shoot up some place and go out in a blaze of glory, you are going to want to go someplace where you can do this with relative impunity. You aren’t going to, say, walk into a police station and start shooting up the place because, while you might get away with it for as long as the surprise lasted, the odds are someone is going to shoot you down like a dog, or arrest you before you can really get rolling, unless you get lucky.
I think the deterrent value of having armed security that people KNOW is there would detract from many of these attacks…the folks doing them would simply go somewhere else to do their crimes IMHO.
Deaths due to guns has steadily dropped in the US during the last decade or so. We ARE doing things about them. Same as alcohol. My point, which I’ve given repeatedly, is about societal risk. By having alcohol (or guns) in society, we accept that a certain level of harm is going to be caused, no matter what we do. MY point has nothing to do with us not doing anything about alcohol deaths, or society not trying to fix it…as I’ve explained over and over again.
So, yes…my point is germane. It can be handwaved and dismissed (it has been, it will most likely continue to be).
I think you’d have to more than double it. I didn’t propose anything except paying two people standing around every school. If this really happened they would need training, equipment, certification and a lot of other things, and for a lot of schools I don’t think two guards would be adequate. I went to a high school with maybe 1,200 or 1,500 students and there certainly wasn’t just one entrance - it was probably more like a dozen.
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Still…who would paying for this? Is the NRA going to pay for it, or is it up to the states or local government…or the Federal government?
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The NRA isn’t paying for shit. That’s why they said schools should be guarded by police: if they’d said something about private security, someone would have suggested they chip in. And of course the NRA is pretending that the topic of concern is just school shootings, not shooting sprees in general.
And MY point is that we have a very clear event on the horizon that will reduce alcohol deaths to zero. Thus, the “certain level of harm” is eliminated. There is nothing on the horizon for guns. Thus from my point of view, the “certain level of harm” for alcohol ends at 0, where the “certain level of harm” for guns does not.
And from where I am sitting, your only answer to this is “magic lolz”.
Well, you give a magical solution that has very little basis in fact, then attempt to poison the well with your ‘magic lolz’ comment (especially since I DID answer this question earlier…short answer, the technology isn’t nearly ready for prime time, and would cost the world to impliment and would take a long time to make ubiquitous enough to have a measurable effect on drunk driving stats). Here’s the thing…if we posit a technology that will magically take alcohol deaths to zero, we could equally posit a technology that would make guns that can’t be used to kill the innocent or whatever. The technology exists at about the same level for active safe systems as for auto-driving systems today. So, while I doubt such systems would ever take gun deaths to zero (I also doubt that even your magic auto-driving tech would either), it could substantially reduce harm.
And it’s equally as likely…a few decades or maybe centuries down the pike. Maybe. Could happen.