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More on guns
According to this article, a bipartisan group of Senators including at least 10 Democrats and 10 Republicans has agreed on the outlines of a gun-violence law. The "10 Republicans" is important, because it means the law (once all the details are written) has a good chance of actually being voted on.
So what's in this law?
I don't know if there are numbers attached to any of these things yet.
Now, I'm all in favor of spending a bunch of money on mental health care, and if it takes a series of dramatic mass-shootings to get that, so be it. I doubt it will have much effect on future mass-shootings, but it could help with suicide and domestic violence, which each take far more lives per year than mass-shootings.
The red-flag laws and slightly greater background checks for gun-buyers under 21 are probably good ideas -- baby steps, but they'll probably save a few lives.
The "armed guards at schools" lends itself to quantitative analysis. There are about 130,000 elementary and secondary schools in the US. If a trained, qualified, background-checked armed guard costs $75K/year, putting one armed guard at each school will cost about $10 billion/year. Some schools will need more than 40 hours/week of coverage, and large schools will need more than one guard at a time, so let's guess $20 billion/year.
Of these 130,000 schools, about one in 2000 will experience a school shooting in any given year. If you're an armed school guard for 20 years, there's a 1% chance you'll ever have a shooting to deal with; the vast majority of these armed guards will never do anything useful. School shootings come in two kinds (as I understand it): somebody shooting a single, specific other person for a specific reason (more common), and indiscriminate mass shootings (rare). In the former case, the armed guard won't even get there until it's over. In the latter case, the odds are on the bad guy: a mass-shooter always has the advantage of surprise, and carries heavier weapons and armor for his Glorious Day In The Sun than a guard does for a Typical Boring Day At Work, so the armed guard can perhaps put a couple of bullets into the bad guy's body armor before being killed himself. And of course armed guards at schools won't help with shootings in grocery stores, or movie theaters, or fast food restaurants, or night clubs, or outdoor concerts, or hospitals, or shopping malls. But optimistically, armed guards might save 100 lives a year.
So we're spending $20 billion/year to save 100 lives/year, or $200 million per life. According to this article, the US government normally considers a human life to be worth $10 million when it evaluates proposed safety measures (e.g. at a meat-processing plant). Installing armed guards at every elementary and high school in the country is twenty times too expensive to be considered financially sound by the usual standard. Is a child's (or a teacher's) life twenty times more valuable than an average person's?
For comparison, $20 billion/year in the National School Lunch Program would cover another 30 million schoolchildren, and $20 billion/year in Medicare would cover an additional 15-20 million senior citizens.
Of course, I haven't considered any other potential downsides to armed guards in schools. If we're paying these guards to respond to shootings, somebody will inevitably suggest that they make themselves useful in the meantime by also intervening in ordinary, non-gun violence at the school. And now you have a guy with a gun wading into a fight that until now did not involve a gun, with a chance that either he'll shoot somebody or one of the students will grab his gun and shoot somebody. Ordinary fistfights in school are probably a million times more common than shootings, a few hundred per year per school, so if there's a 1/1000 chance of somebody getting shot when an armed guard intervenes in a fistfight, that means tens of thousands of people getting shot per year as a result of armed guards who were put there to save 100 lives. Doesn't seem like a net win to me, but YMMV.
Anyway, back to the article.
"John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who has an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association, said last week that he is interested in forging a compromise, but only if it preserves gun owners’ rights under the Second Amendment.
“'This is not about creating new restrictions on law-abiding citizens,' he said. 'It’s about ensuring that the system we already have in place works as intended.'”
He doesn't want to place any new restrictions on "law-abiding citizens", such as the mass-shooter at Uvalde, the mass-shooter at Buffalo, the mass-shooter at Tree of Life Synagogue, the mass-shooter at the Pulse night club, the mass-shooter at the Vegas music festival, the mass-shooter at Parkland High School, the mass-shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary, the mass-shooter at Virginia Tech, and hundreds more, every one of whom was a law-abiding citizen until the day he became a mass murderer. By which time it was too late to do anything about it. If you don't change what "law-abiding citizens" are allowed to do, you'll have no impact on mass shootings by people with no prior criminal record -- which is apparently most of them.
So what's in this law?
- Federal grants would "encourage states to implement red-flag laws"
- Federal criminal background checks for gun buyers under 21 would include a mandatory search of juvenile justice records
- billions of Federal dollars for mental health care and "community behavioral health clinics"
- billions of Federal dollars for armed guards and security infrastructure at schools
I don't know if there are numbers attached to any of these things yet.
Now, I'm all in favor of spending a bunch of money on mental health care, and if it takes a series of dramatic mass-shootings to get that, so be it. I doubt it will have much effect on future mass-shootings, but it could help with suicide and domestic violence, which each take far more lives per year than mass-shootings.
The red-flag laws and slightly greater background checks for gun-buyers under 21 are probably good ideas -- baby steps, but they'll probably save a few lives.
The "armed guards at schools" lends itself to quantitative analysis. There are about 130,000 elementary and secondary schools in the US. If a trained, qualified, background-checked armed guard costs $75K/year, putting one armed guard at each school will cost about $10 billion/year. Some schools will need more than 40 hours/week of coverage, and large schools will need more than one guard at a time, so let's guess $20 billion/year.
Of these 130,000 schools, about one in 2000 will experience a school shooting in any given year. If you're an armed school guard for 20 years, there's a 1% chance you'll ever have a shooting to deal with; the vast majority of these armed guards will never do anything useful. School shootings come in two kinds (as I understand it): somebody shooting a single, specific other person for a specific reason (more common), and indiscriminate mass shootings (rare). In the former case, the armed guard won't even get there until it's over. In the latter case, the odds are on the bad guy: a mass-shooter always has the advantage of surprise, and carries heavier weapons and armor for his Glorious Day In The Sun than a guard does for a Typical Boring Day At Work, so the armed guard can perhaps put a couple of bullets into the bad guy's body armor before being killed himself. And of course armed guards at schools won't help with shootings in grocery stores, or movie theaters, or fast food restaurants, or night clubs, or outdoor concerts, or hospitals, or shopping malls. But optimistically, armed guards might save 100 lives a year.
So we're spending $20 billion/year to save 100 lives/year, or $200 million per life. According to this article, the US government normally considers a human life to be worth $10 million when it evaluates proposed safety measures (e.g. at a meat-processing plant). Installing armed guards at every elementary and high school in the country is twenty times too expensive to be considered financially sound by the usual standard. Is a child's (or a teacher's) life twenty times more valuable than an average person's?
For comparison, $20 billion/year in the National School Lunch Program would cover another 30 million schoolchildren, and $20 billion/year in Medicare would cover an additional 15-20 million senior citizens.
Of course, I haven't considered any other potential downsides to armed guards in schools. If we're paying these guards to respond to shootings, somebody will inevitably suggest that they make themselves useful in the meantime by also intervening in ordinary, non-gun violence at the school. And now you have a guy with a gun wading into a fight that until now did not involve a gun, with a chance that either he'll shoot somebody or one of the students will grab his gun and shoot somebody. Ordinary fistfights in school are probably a million times more common than shootings, a few hundred per year per school, so if there's a 1/1000 chance of somebody getting shot when an armed guard intervenes in a fistfight, that means tens of thousands of people getting shot per year as a result of armed guards who were put there to save 100 lives. Doesn't seem like a net win to me, but YMMV.
Anyway, back to the article.
"John Cornyn (R-Tex.), who has an A-plus rating from the National Rifle Association, said last week that he is interested in forging a compromise, but only if it preserves gun owners’ rights under the Second Amendment.
“'This is not about creating new restrictions on law-abiding citizens,' he said. 'It’s about ensuring that the system we already have in place works as intended.'”
He doesn't want to place any new restrictions on "law-abiding citizens", such as the mass-shooter at Uvalde, the mass-shooter at Buffalo, the mass-shooter at Tree of Life Synagogue, the mass-shooter at the Pulse night club, the mass-shooter at the Vegas music festival, the mass-shooter at Parkland High School, the mass-shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary, the mass-shooter at Virginia Tech, and hundreds more, every one of whom was a law-abiding citizen until the day he became a mass murderer. By which time it was too late to do anything about it. If you don't change what "law-abiding citizens" are allowed to do, you'll have no impact on mass shootings by people with no prior criminal record -- which is apparently most of them.
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I'll bet it's a pool of money and schools can apply for it. And I'll bet it morphs into arming existing staff, not hiring guards. But time will tell.
That item is clearly there to placate the Republicans and NRA fans. I wonder whether it's meant to carry real weight. I haven't seen any numbers yet, either.
10 Republicans in the group is important. 11 would have been better; I hope the Dems don't have any holdouts like they sometimes do, should it come to needing to override a filibuster.
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Ah, good point. Here's hoping.
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Ah, so the opposite of de-escalation. Can't wait until the first security guard kills a kid and there's a call to arm the security guard guards.
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Do not like. I'm convinced more kids are harmed by school cops getting their kicks in any given month than are saved per year by them.
Okay, so I haven't actually run the numbers, but putting more cops near minority schoolkids is not something I want to see happen. When you add cops to schools, you *do* see that what should be internal problems, handled by the staff, suddenly becomes police problems and little kids end up in handcuffs.
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Added a paragraph about this scenario.