The Cold Math of Securing Schools

Lionfish said:
YOU don't think America can afford to protect our children
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I didn't say that. But, if you want to save the lives of kids, there are all sorts of options that would cost, say $10 million per life saved but which are currently considered too expensive to be worth doing.... better subsidies for childhood healthcare, for example, tighter product safety regs, better safety equipment on highways, and so on. If we piss away $555 million per life saved, or more, on locking down schools, that's money not available to protection far more children in far more cost effective ways.
 
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Mina said:
Well, it's too bad you don't like them enough to want to spend money on things that would actually make them safer, rather than this security theater designed to prevent gun control.



What makes you think I think you do?



Actually, exactly 0% of all mass shootings have occurred in gun-free zones, by definition. If a zone is free of guns, a shooting is impossible. Obviously.
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Oh my God.
Moron.
Gun free zones are legally defined.
No guns are legal in gun free zones.
If a criminal breaks the law and brings a gun there it is still a gun free zone as mandated in the Gun free zones Act of 1990.
 
LurchAddams said:
Turning schools into "prisons" and arming teachers. Republicans are so fucking stupid. Teachers and kids aren't soldiers. We need to get the ARs of the street.
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Thank you for your frank and sudden grasp of reality.

YES,
Train and arm the teachers that want to be armed. 12 states already have that program with no shootings to date.
Turn the school buildings into something that makes it nearly impossible to have an incident like what has happened so often. I go to Israel as my example but plenty in this country have already taken those steps and so far it is very successful.

BTW if this country had teachers and kids that were more like soldiers, we wouldn't have to have 26 genders and five bathrooms in each school building not to mention the discipline problem that is driving kids' parents to seek private schools might just cease.
 
Mina said:
I didn't say that. But, if you want to save the lives of kids, there are all sorts of options that would cost, say $10 million per life saved but which are currently considered too expensive to be worth doing.... better subsidies for childhood healthcare, for example, tighter product safety regs, better safety equipment on highways, and son on. If we piss away $555 million per life saved, or more, on locking down schools, that's money not available to protection far more children in far more cost effective ways.
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Your math is just wrong as has been mentioned by several others.
 
Mina said:
I didn't say that. But, if you want to save the lives of kids, there are all sorts of options that would cost, say $10 million per life saved but which are currently considered too expensive to be worth doing.... better subsidies for childhood healthcare, for example, tighter product safety regs, better safety equipment on highways, and son on. If we piss away $555 million per life saved, or more, on locking down schools, that's money not available to protection far more children in far more cost effective ways.
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I do not know how to respond to your ignorance. Putting a cost per is not possible. Please stop responding until you think before you type.
 
Lionfish said:
Not really. the NSSF has given away nearly 40 million free gun locks. The NRA has offered free gun safety programs to children for decades. Every firearms organization has called for our schools to be hardened and programs like OHIO's FASTER programs have trained and armed teachers in 12 states.
Don't pull the hindsight bullcrap, this is basic shit and it is programs like "defund the police" and BLM activists that prevented and stalled many of these programs from ever being put into action.
Just like "build the wall", "harden our schools". It's good for America.
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We justt witnessed an armed and trained police force fail, and you expect a barely trained, inexperienced teacher to succeed? We are far far better off enacting sensible gun laws that the folly you offer.
 
Rune said:
That isn't a security door you [much smarter person than I]
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Yes. And that's what I'm saying. In order to make this effective, you wouldn't just need to lock the door. You'd need extremely expensive retrofits -- security doors and windows throughout the ground floor, at least.

See here:

https://resources.finalsite.net/ima...2/wsk12nyus/lzdk9x8rn1bonkcxbn34/IMG_4838.jpg

Throw a security door there and they go through the floor-to-ceiling window right next to it. Secure that, and there are dozens and dozens of other windows a person could be through in five seconds all along that ground floor. In order to make the locks matter, you'd need to refit the whole ground floor, likely at a cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per school.

The math I did assumed a pretty low cost per school (low six figures), including security guards, and it also assume PERFECT effectiveness (eliminating ALL school shootings, and without those guard being responsible for any killings of their own). Yet, even gaming the numbers that hard in favor of the policy, it STILL came out with a cost-per-life-saved of over half a billion dollars.
 
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Lionfish said:
Thank you for your frank and sudden grasp of reality.

YES,
Train and arm the teachers that want to be armed. 12 states already have that program with no shootings to date.
Turn the school buildings into something that makes it nearly impossible to have an incident like what has happened so often. I go to Israel as my example but plenty in this country have already taken those steps and so far it is very successful.

BTW if this country had teachers and kids that were more like soldiers, we wouldn't have to have 26 genders and five bathrooms in each school building not to mention the discipline problem that is driving kids' parents to seek private schools might just cease.
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21 Funerals this week for innocent people torn up because your stupid guns are so precious to you, more precious to you than our babies.

Turning schools into prisons and arming the kids and teachers? You are such a fucking evil idiot.


Fuck off, shithead.
 
Rune said:
Your math is just wrong as has been mentioned by several others.
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What makes you think that? "Math" has only been mentioned in this thread a few times, and before you, each other mention was by me. Which particular post came up with different math?
 
Lionfish said:
I do not know how to respond to your [superior arguments]. Putting a cost per is not possible.
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Why not? We implicitly decide all the time whether various spending/regs are worth it based on cost-per-life-saved calculations. I provided ample links to that in the top post. Why should this be different?
 
Rune said:
That isn't a security door you laughable bimbo.
And no you can't break a window and reach in, security doors are made of steel with tiny wire reinforced windows and are keyed from both sides.
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Congratulations, you have just proposed that our children should be burned alive in schools since you have locked all the doors and made it impossible to exit without a key.

Fire codes do not allow for what you are proposing for the very real reason that doing what you proposed has resulted in deaths which resulted in changing the laws to require fire exits that can be easily opened.
 
LurchAddams said:
21 Funerals this week for innocent people torn up because your stupid guns are so precious to you, more precious to you than our babies.

Turning schools into prisons and arming the kids and teachers? You are such a fucking evil idiot.


Fuck off, shithead.
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Love your typical malcontent leftie response but
did they all die because of a door propped open?
The failure of anyone to respond to the ten minutes of shooting before this asshat entered the school?
Lots of questions here all of them over your pay grade except your ability to deflect by saying "Fuck off, shithead"
I find sudden newcomers with thousands of posts in just a few weeks to be interesting. Who were you before you were kicked off this forum?
 
Lionfish said:
Love your typical malcontent leftie response but
did they all die because of a door propped open?
The failure of anyone to respond to the ten minutes of shooting before this asshat entered the school?
Lots of questions here all of them over your pay grade except your ability to deflect by saying "Fuck off, shithead"
I find sudden newcomers with thousands of posts in just a few weeks to be interesting. Who were you before you were kicked off this forum?
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21 funerals. Your screeching about "doors" isn't going to save your soul I hope visions of those poor kids running around the classroom, screaming and having their heads blown off are in your head forever, punk.
 
Rune said:
Your math is just wrong as has been mentioned by several others.
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OK, let's turn this around. What does YOUR math say?

Let's go WAAAAAY cheaper than I did last time. Say it's just $50,000 per school..... say one minimum-wage guard and some minor retrofits with security doors and the like. Well, there are still 130,930 schools. So, that's about $6.5 billion per year.

Now, how many lives will that save?

Again, we have a cap to work with, since we know we've been averaging about 36 school shooter deaths per year. We'll round up to 40. So, assume for the sake of argument the plan works perfectly, by saving every one of them without costing a single life (e.g., no incidents where our minimum-wage guard mistakes a kid with a squirt gun for an active shooter and kills him). So $6.5 billion divided by 40.

That's still $162.5 million per life saved.

Now, again, remember that when the government considers things like new environmental regulations, if the cost goes over a certain threshold, it's considered not worth it. In 2001, it was $6.1 million:

https://web.mst.edu/rrbryant/cba/Arsenic Controversy.pdf

That led even the liberal Michael Kinsley to grudgingly admit that George Bush was right not to tighten regulatory standards around arsenic in water:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...ic-darn/566e8ac9-b39b-4d35-9eae-f8564bd724d3/

Adjusted for inflation that's just under $10 million today.

So, how about instead of pissing away that $6.5 billion to save 40 lives, we instead go with a bunch of programs that cost just over $10 million per life saved? In other words, we go with programs currently deemed just slightly too expensive to be worth it. Say $12 million per life saved. Well then, with $6.5 billion, we'd save about 542 lives, which randomly would mean around 120 kids lives saved, or three times as many as we'd save with school security.... with all those adult lives saved just thrown in for good measure.

If you don't like my math, what's yours? How much would you spend, and how many lives would you expect it to save?
 
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