Former SecEd Bill Bennett floated a school safety plan today:
Find me the back of an envelope, will you?
There are nearly 100,000 schools in the United States. I think you're going to need way more than 100,000 armed public safety officers to cover all those schools, but let's be conservative and keep the number for our purposes.
You need to pay these people, give them benefits (heaven forbid!), train them, equip them, and so on. I think a very conservative estimate would be $100,000 per officer per year.
That's $10,000,000,000 - ten billion dollars - every year to have a dedicated, armed officer in every public school in America. Again, it's probably more - a lot more.
We spend around half-a-trillion dollars a year on public education. So, to put an armed officer in every school in America, we'd need to increase our total spending on K-12 schools by at least 2%.
Does that make any sense to you? Keep in mind, there is no guarantee that an armed guard at Sandy Hook Elementary would have stopped this heavily-armed man in combat gear who was suicidal.
I think I'd rather take that $10 billion and put it into universal mental health care.
(Whoops, messed up my digits first time around...)
3 comments:
Dear God, this is where we are in this country, an armed guard for every school in the US. All because we are awash in guns and there seem to be so many demented unhinged people determined to kill and maim as many innocent people as possible. What is it about these psychopaths and schools, why in God's name do they want to attack kids and teachers in schools from the US, to China, Germany, Australia and Scotland? Although Australia and Scotland significantly beefed up their gun laws and have not had any major incidents in many years. China has very restrictive gun laws so their maniacs use knives. Depend upon Bill Bennett for the worst ideas possible.
Bill Bennett is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
I seriously doubt that a couple of armed guards would have stopped the Connecticut murderer. The money would be better spent on background checks for legal weapons purchasers, mental health programs, and education in general.
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