I think it’s been mentioned here, but one of the most dissuasive arguments against most of the ‘building hardening’ approaches to curb the tragic loss from school shootings is …
Unless you create attached/underground parking garages and bus every single child to/from school (in … Up-armored Humvees ?) … there will be a defined time where they arrive at (and enter) and leave from the school.
Which ‘preserves’ the ‘fish in a barrel’ element that we’re desperately trying to solve.
Even recess – unless it’s confined to interior courtyards and playgrounds not visible from public spaces – puts a concentrated number of kids in a vulnerable position at a time.
Armed officers at each school seems wrongheaded for no end of reasons – not the least of which is the length of time it takes these school shooters to kill the number of kids they kill.
Unless you have a relatively small facility and the armed officer happens to be fairly close to the ‘action,’ the amount of damage that can be done is still devastating.
Even more so on, for example, university campuses where you’d pretty much have to arrive at a ratio of armed officers per square foot of enclosed campus buildings and or open campus area.
In terms of arming teachers (or other civilians): we constantly hear no end of alarming failure stories of LE professionals who are highly trained, well equipped, and well compensated. Replacing these people with – effectively – totally untrained amateurs seems unwise at best.
Upstream solutions seem far more cost effective to me, and I am one who favors putting all social determinants of violence on the white board and talking about each.
But we have to rank them in terms of cost, benefit, and the likely time it would take to derive those benefits. Things without an immediate payoff should absolutely not be taken off the table. This shitstorm was a long time coming. It’s time we work on the systemic problems and the lethal symptoms.