The Cold Math of Securing Schools

dukkha said:
we just blew $54 billion on Ukraine -more to come
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The hope is that the spending in Ukraine will deter future aggression -- not just by Russia but by any would-be empire-builders, including China, by sending a signal that military aggression is never going to be an advantage to a country, so don't even bother. That could, in theory, save more money in the long run.
 
NiftyNiblick said:
Pretend you care about the children, and then run down Democrats.
Why don't you just tattoo "Asshole" across your forehead so you don't have to open your fucking mouth for people to know.
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I didn't run down democrats you cunt.
Biden is an aberration.
Now defend gun free zones you sackless faggot.
 
Celticguy said:
keep the doors locked (from the outside), easy peasy.
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I'm not convinced that would make a lot of difference. First, obviously, most schools have a whole bunch of ground-floor windows, and a person could walk up to any of them, break the glass, and climb through. Or go up to the front door, which almost always will have a window in it, break the glass, reach through, and open the door from inside. Or show up at the start of the day when kids are streaming in and doors are wide open.

Second, most schools are going to have multiple entryways, and people coming and going throughout the day. So, you could just hang out before recess time near the door that opens for recess, and wait for someone to open it.

A locked door just isn't going to matter without massively expensive retrofits:

https://resources.finalsite.net/ima...2/wsk12nyus/lzdk9x8rn1bonkcxbn34/IMG_4838.jpg
 
NiftyNiblick said:
We're not going to do shit about school shootings, so why waste our time talking about it?
It's pretty obvious that Americans are willing to sacrifice kids for total firearms freedom. No value judgements. People feel what they feel.
We have our values and the civilized world has theirs.

How long ago was Columbine?
Why do you bang your heads against the wall?

Middle America doesn't even believe that Sandy Hook happened at all.
At least when a few Texas kids get capped and wasted, they at least acknowledge that it happened.
They still don't care, however.
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I've already seen the "false flag" garbage popping up with TX, too.
 
Mina said:
Certainly the Afghanistan occupation was horribly wasteful. But, even so, there are plenty of things that money would be better spent on than securing our schools. The math just doesn't work. Any realistic cost-per-life-saved figure for that effort ends up far and away too high to make sense.
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Maybe one of today's dumbest comments. This government should have its budget cut by at least 50% and it would go unnoticed by most US citizens. They threw two trillion at the China Virus and now they have millions of test kits and vaccines that nobody wants and you say spending money on protecting our kids in their schools is not a good investment?
+
 
Rune said:
You don't have children.
Those that do are more than willing to pay the price.
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You don't have children. If you did, you would care enough about them to want to spend that money on something that would save vastly more children's lives, rather than pissing it away on security theater at schools.

They prefer the safety of "gun free zones" and helpless victims.
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No. They regularly attack places that have guns. In fact, the US, which is as far from a "gun free zone" as any wealthy nation, is the epicenter of such attacks.
 
floridafan said:
Can an AR15 style rifle break through a lock in seconds? Or maybe the shooter chooses to wait until the kids are at recess and on the playground.
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break a lock ? depends on the lock and the ammunition.
armed offices will be outdoors, and shooter is better served by having kids confined.
 
Mina said:
After a school shooter kills a bunch of kids, people intent on diverting attention from gun control have a tendency to focus on enhancing physical security at schools, by way of armed guards, armored access points, etc. It can seem heartless to focus on the cost of those things when kids are dying.... but that's what I'm going to do.

First, installing one armed guard at a school is unlikely to do anything. Someone intent on mass slaughter could simply walk up to the guard and gun him down before he even had his gun unholstered. It would just be another body on the pile. If you're going to make any real difference, you'd need at least two on duty, with a multiple-checkpoint setup, such that if you attack the guard at the first checkpoint, the second checkpoint gets locked down by a second guard (probably manning a security camera feed some distance away) and the attacker can't get in. That's the kind of setup you see at secure facilities.

So, what would it cost, per school, to have a setup like that? Assuming you're not comfortable with untrained minimum-wage goons, let's say $50,000 per guard per year, minimum, fully loaded (counting benefits). And let's say 2.5 guards per school (some extra to cover absences). There are 130,930 K-12 schools in the US. So, about $16.4 billion per year, plus however much you need for those security cameras, remote locking doors, and other retrofits. We'll conservatively estimate those are fairly cheap and the whole thing can cost just $20 billion per year.

OK. And how many lives will that save? Let's give it every benefit of the doubt and imagine it's perfectly effective -- that these guards manage to completely stop school shootings, while never accidentally shooting the wrong person. So, let's say about 36 lives saved per year, average:

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/07/us/ten-years-of-school-shootings-trnd/

OK, that's a cost-per-life-saved of about $556 million per life.

Now, you might be tempted to say a life is infinitely valuable, so that's well worth it. But, as a practical matter, that's just not how budgeting is done in other contexts.

For example, in the Bush years, if a proposed EPA rule cost over $3.7 million per anticipated life saved (e.g., efforts to reduce arsenic in drinking water), it was considered too expensive to be worth it. With Clinton, they were more liberal about it and put the threshold at $6.1 million:

https://www.americanprogress.org/ar...-costs-and-benefits-of-cost-benefit-analysis/

Obviously, even the higher of those numbers is VASTLY below the $556 million level we're talking about here.

Some studies suggest that any regulation that costs more than, say, $15 million per life saved will actually hurt income levels enough that such a regulation will indirectly cost more lives than it will save:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1999.tb01450.x
https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...rall/d2010e118e2edcd1e2e0e99227af6047b66355e6

For example, people whose take-home pay is lower thanks to funding all this extra school security may skimp on vehicle maintenance or healthcare, and that will end up costing more lives than you're saving.

Some studies have put the number even lower, around $12 million:

https://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/215_Value_of_Life_Legal_Contexts.pdf

The gap we're talking about is huge, between that hypothetical $12M-$15M/life point of being counter-productive, and the $556M/life we're talking about here.

Even if you think you can get all that benefit with only half as many guards with half the other security spending, we're still talking almost twenty times the cost-per-life-saved that studies say you can have before the cost is actually driving deaths UP indirectly.

Even if you're in the camp where money should be no object when it comes to saving the lives of kids, then spend those same billions on bigger subsidies for childhood healthcare, for instance, or regulations to make vehicles safer, or spending to make roads safer (more streetlights and guardrails, better signage), or enhanced childhood nutrition, etc.; you'd save many, many more lives of children:

https://books.google.com/books?id=L...ge&q="cost per life saved" guardrails&f=false

So, the approach of trying to prevent school shootings by way of more physical security is almost certainly a loser. Any spending in that area is likely to have a cost-per-life-saved so huge that we'd do better spending the same money any number of other places.... or not spending it at all.
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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.
 
Earl said:
Nonsense.

There would be thousands of volunteers who would work for zero wages.

Where there are no volunteers, hire retired military, police. Just salary, these people already have benefits.

The solution that the left desires is the total confiscation of all guns.

Then, only the children shooters will have guns.
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My dear, no one had ever advocated the confiscation of all guns.
 
Mina said:
I'm not convinced that would make a lot of difference. First, obviously, most schools have a whole bunch of ground-floor windows, and a person could walk up to any of them, break the glass, and climb through. Or go up to the front door, which almost always will have a window in it, break the glass, reach through, and open the door from inside. Or show up at the start of the day when kids are streaming in and doors are wide open.

Second, most schools are going to have multiple entryways, and people coming and going throughout the day. So, you could just hang out before recess time near the door that opens for recess, and wait for someone to open it.

A locked door just isn't going to matter without massively expensive retrofits:

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

is the only reasonable decision to take all guns?
 
Mina said:
I'm not convinced that would make a lot of difference. First, obviously, most schools have a whole bunch of ground-floor windows, and a person could walk up to any of them, break the glass, and climb through. Or go up to the front door, which almost always will have a window in it, break the glass, reach through, and open the door from inside. Or show up at the start of the day when kids are streaming in and doors are wide open.

Second, most schools are going to have multiple entryways, and people coming and going throughout the day. So, you could just hang out before recess time near the door that opens for recess, and wait for someone to open it.

A locked door just isn't going to matter without massively expensive retrofits:

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


forced entry takes time and allows resource officers/cops to take appropriate action to confine the shooter.

the element of surprise is crucial here.

and the doors/locks are pretty secure.
 
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