Arkady
President
I keep hearing people in the media talking about ideas for preventing school shootings that are based around adding guns to the mix: things like having specially trained teachers packing heat, or hiring armed officers for the schools. There's usually some pretty good discussion about the potential downside in terms of wrongful shootings we should anticipate with those extra guns. However, there's almost never any discussion of cost. It's as if it's considered crass even to imply there's some cost that would be too high to be worth it even if it saves lives. But that absolutely should be a consideration.
Let's take the cheap option -- specially training volunteer teachers who come with their own guns. What would that cost? There are 131,890 primary and secondary schools in the US. So, let's say you train an average of three teachers per school, at an average annual cost of $5,000 per year each. So, that costs $1,978,350,000 per year, nationally.
Now, what kind of life savings would you get from that? You can use this for the data:
http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/export-finished?filename=public://export-58abab66-bf92-4fed-aaff-d30bb8cc9781.csv&uuid=7b6644b6-cdd5-43f3-8fcd-86a1845e140b&return_href=query/7b6644b6-cdd5-43f3-8fcd-86a1845e140b
Since the start of 2014, 70 people have been killed in school shootings. However, a large share of those were killed in incidents where there was only one victim (sometimes a suicide or an accidental discharge), and we couldn't reasonably expect to be saving any lives there by adding armed teachers to the mix. Counting only those incidents with at least two fatalities, there have been 40 dead, total, or about 9.6 deaths per year, average. So, let's imagine that seeding the schools with an average of three armed and trained teachers prevents a little over half of those deaths, or about 5 per year. That works out to a cost of $395,670,000 per life saved.
Your first instinct may be to say that nearly $400 million is a small price to pay to save a child's life. But that's actually not true, once you remember opportunity cost. What could you have done with that money if you hadn't blown it on training those teachers to tote guns in our schools? This is a concept that right-wingers get when you are talking about something other than boosting profits for gun manufacturers. Consider:
https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/broughel-life-saving-regulations-wp-mercatus-v3.pdf
As that paper points out, at some point between about $75.4 million and $123.2 million, you're paying so much per life saved that you actually INCREASE mortality. That can happen through a lot of mechanisms, but one is that the cost associated with the extra expenditure results in people having less take-home pay to spend on things like healthcare, and so they're more likely to die of various illnesses. So, for example, because of the extra money spent paying to train gun-toting teachers, you have less money to pay for a medical screening for your kid that would have identified a nascent cancer in time to save his life.
As you can see, even the very top of the threshold identified by the Mercatus Center study is less than a third of what we're talking about spending to train those teachers, in terms of cost-per-life-saved. So, it'll almost certainly result in MORE deaths, even if we completely ignore the extra wrongful shootings associated with those guns we're putting in our schools. Even if we could cut that training cost by two-thirds, without boosting wrongful shootings, we're not going to break even when it comes to total mortality. And that's using the cheapest of the realistic options on the table for putting more "good guys with guns" in our schools. If you instead hire full-time officers, the cost-per-life-saved would be over ten times that high per gun.
Do the math. To make this work, even if you have a magical intervention that prevents 100% of deadly school shootings (even all those suicides), that would still be only about 17 lives saved per year. If you don't want to go over $123.2 million per life saved, and thus actually increase overall mortality, your magical intervention can't cost more than $2,094,400,000. And that means you'd need to keep the cost well under $16,000 per school per year. Do you have an idea for preventing all school shootings that costs less than $16,000 per school -- or an idea for reducing such shootings by half at less than $8,000 per school? Or reducing them by a quarter for less than $4,000 per school?
As you can see, the math on this isn't very forgiving. When you're addressing a very tiny statistical risk spread across a very large number of schools, it is practically impossible to devise interventions that make sense. That's not to say we should ignore the problem. But we'd do better trying to figure out interventions that have positive side effects outside the schools as well -- for example, more social workers in schools, who can not only reduce the risk of someone going off the deep end and shooting up the school, but also the risk that he'll end up killing people elsewhere, while increasing the chances he'll wind up a well-adjusted and productive member of society. Gun control, likewise, could make economic sense, if it produces a significant life savings outside the schools as well.
Let's take the cheap option -- specially training volunteer teachers who come with their own guns. What would that cost? There are 131,890 primary and secondary schools in the US. So, let's say you train an average of three teachers per school, at an average annual cost of $5,000 per year each. So, that costs $1,978,350,000 per year, nationally.
Now, what kind of life savings would you get from that? You can use this for the data:
http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/export-finished?filename=public://export-58abab66-bf92-4fed-aaff-d30bb8cc9781.csv&uuid=7b6644b6-cdd5-43f3-8fcd-86a1845e140b&return_href=query/7b6644b6-cdd5-43f3-8fcd-86a1845e140b
Since the start of 2014, 70 people have been killed in school shootings. However, a large share of those were killed in incidents where there was only one victim (sometimes a suicide or an accidental discharge), and we couldn't reasonably expect to be saving any lives there by adding armed teachers to the mix. Counting only those incidents with at least two fatalities, there have been 40 dead, total, or about 9.6 deaths per year, average. So, let's imagine that seeding the schools with an average of three armed and trained teachers prevents a little over half of those deaths, or about 5 per year. That works out to a cost of $395,670,000 per life saved.
Your first instinct may be to say that nearly $400 million is a small price to pay to save a child's life. But that's actually not true, once you remember opportunity cost. What could you have done with that money if you hadn't blown it on training those teachers to tote guns in our schools? This is a concept that right-wingers get when you are talking about something other than boosting profits for gun manufacturers. Consider:
https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/broughel-life-saving-regulations-wp-mercatus-v3.pdf
As that paper points out, at some point between about $75.4 million and $123.2 million, you're paying so much per life saved that you actually INCREASE mortality. That can happen through a lot of mechanisms, but one is that the cost associated with the extra expenditure results in people having less take-home pay to spend on things like healthcare, and so they're more likely to die of various illnesses. So, for example, because of the extra money spent paying to train gun-toting teachers, you have less money to pay for a medical screening for your kid that would have identified a nascent cancer in time to save his life.
As you can see, even the very top of the threshold identified by the Mercatus Center study is less than a third of what we're talking about spending to train those teachers, in terms of cost-per-life-saved. So, it'll almost certainly result in MORE deaths, even if we completely ignore the extra wrongful shootings associated with those guns we're putting in our schools. Even if we could cut that training cost by two-thirds, without boosting wrongful shootings, we're not going to break even when it comes to total mortality. And that's using the cheapest of the realistic options on the table for putting more "good guys with guns" in our schools. If you instead hire full-time officers, the cost-per-life-saved would be over ten times that high per gun.
Do the math. To make this work, even if you have a magical intervention that prevents 100% of deadly school shootings (even all those suicides), that would still be only about 17 lives saved per year. If you don't want to go over $123.2 million per life saved, and thus actually increase overall mortality, your magical intervention can't cost more than $2,094,400,000. And that means you'd need to keep the cost well under $16,000 per school per year. Do you have an idea for preventing all school shootings that costs less than $16,000 per school -- or an idea for reducing such shootings by half at less than $8,000 per school? Or reducing them by a quarter for less than $4,000 per school?
As you can see, the math on this isn't very forgiving. When you're addressing a very tiny statistical risk spread across a very large number of schools, it is practically impossible to devise interventions that make sense. That's not to say we should ignore the problem. But we'd do better trying to figure out interventions that have positive side effects outside the schools as well -- for example, more social workers in schools, who can not only reduce the risk of someone going off the deep end and shooting up the school, but also the risk that he'll end up killing people elsewhere, while increasing the chances he'll wind up a well-adjusted and productive member of society. Gun control, likewise, could make economic sense, if it produces a significant life savings outside the schools as well.
