3167

Is there even a single scrap of evidence that armed guards in schools would save any lives at all? Putting an armed guard in every school would cost $8 billion dollars a year without any reason to believe it would do any good. Assuming roughly 30 children are killed every year in school shootings and that the armed guards were magically able to stop every single shooting AND the armed guards didn’t actually increase killings (eg. accidents, stolen weapons, etc.), you’re still looking at $260 million per saved child. Surely the education system could do better things with $8 billion.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/21/nra-armed-guards-schools

3168

You seem to think I was making an argument that it was a fiscally responsible policy. I did no such thing.

edit - and yes, I think it’s pretty reasonable to assume that at least one life would be saved out there. I doubt they’d be highly effective, but at least one. Hence my comment “…I have no interest on being the actuary who figures out what a life is worth.”

It is a huge cost and it’s just a matter of where people draw the line on what an acceptable gain might be.

3169

Well, I take issue with your suggestion that an armed guard might save “a life here or there”, since I don’t think there’s any evidence that it is the case. And in general I think that armed guards in schools are a crazily dumb and expensive way to try and deal with gun violence in school.

3170

Really? I mean, just as a thought experiment, you don’t think it’s reasonable to assume a life could be saved by them?

The problem with those articles stating that it has “failed” is in the definition. Let’s go back to the Columbine incident. There was an armed guard, but many people died anyways. Is it conceiveable that the guard really did save one or two of those people out in the parking lot? It’s still a “failure” in that a large number of people died, but if there would have been one or two more if that guard wasn’t there returning fire, that could be deemed a success.

3171

I think a life could be save by them, but it’s equally like (or more likely) that a life could be taken by them, through accident, misuse, or theft of the firearm. I don’t think that there is any evidence that there would be net lives saved through the placement of armed guards in schools.

3172

I don’t think there’s any evidence that there wouldn’t be net lives saved, so I guess we’re both stuck with positions that don’t have hard evidence to knock down the other’s. Congress essentially forbade any government funding go toward anything that could conceiveably be used to curtail gun rights, so efficacy profiles will be run by privately funded and therefore potentially biased firms and individuals. We can see certain stats, like the number of accidental deaths caused by firearms (a little under 1000 per year). fwiw, I don’t seem to be able to find accidental deaths caused by armed school guards, although I certainly acknowledge they can and therefore (under the principle of infinite monkeys) will at some point occur.

3173

Ummm, did you not bother following any of your own links? That was pretty much the point of the blog Houngan linked earlier.

Of course, you can’t draw any conclusions in the aggregate from a single incident (anecdata etc.); but I think that qualifies as a “single scrap of evidence” for the prosecution (or is it the defense?).

3174

The primary reason shootings stop is because the shooter is confronted by someone, usually with the result of suicide. Offhand the shootings that were stopped:

Pearl High School in Mississippi; Sullivan Central High School in Tennessee; Appalachian School of Law in Virginia; a middle school dance in Edinboro, Pa.; Players Bar and Grill in Nevada; a Shoney’s restaurant in Alabama; Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City; New Life Church in Colorado; Clackamas Mall in Oregon (three days before Sandy Hook); Mayan Palace Theater in San Antonio (three days after Sandy Hook).

Not to mention incidents where an unarmed person bravely forced the same result.

The low body count (successful foiling of the attack) means that it’s not big news, by lack of “if it bleeds.” This is all simple stuff we’ve covered before in this thread. I’m not saying it’s economically feasible to have an off-duty cop in every school, but it absolutely would help to stop school shooting sprees. Columbine is about the only example where it happened and it didn’t immediately stop the attack. Contrast that with accidental school shootings by armed guards, which are listed . . . where? Has that even happened?

It’s safe to say that the number of armed guards in schools vastly exceeds the number of spree killers in schools. Shouldn’t we see some representation of the inevitable accidents that are being held as obvious in this thread? I recall a couple of incidents where someone stupidly left their gun in the toilet, but I don’t recall a child ever being harmed. There’s a QED here that actually needs a D before it can be argued, much like the “streets of blood” argument against CCW laws.

Having an armed person in a spree shooting situation is a net positive, in every case I’ve been able to find. Fiscal arguments aside, what’s the demonstrable downside?

3175

Agreed on the tiny sliver of time when the spree is happening. But as others have said repeatedly, the “downside” is the 99.99% percent of the time where there is no spree. Financial costs, or more precisely, the lost opportunity costs that those funds could have been diverted to.

On, potential accidents, you say that you’re unaware of one, yet. Let’s assume that’s true. Multiple the number of armed school guards by 1000X or more of the current numbers. The infinite monkeys scenario that Dan mentioned.

Of the two, I’d agree that the financial issue is the much bigger thing, as opposed to the accident issue, which is unpredictable (just as school shootings are). The financial costs would be very concrete.

3176

A reasonable stance, but your argument from magnitude seems to be contradicted by the CCW experiment in america, now in roughly its twentieth year. We all drive carefully, and I would posit even more so when passing a school or pedestrian children. With relatively untrained CCW holders experiencing the full range of social interaction, the incidence of accidental shootings is still vanishingly low in the scenario of “CCW holder mistakenly intervenes.” I would wager that I can find three positive counterexamples for every negative.

3177

I don’t buy it. A guy with a gun shows up, and the shooter commits suicide. That doesn’t mean that the shooter committed suicide because of the confrontation, and he may well have killed himself whether or not confronted by a guard. But in any event, my argument is not that it is impossible for an armed guard to save someone, but rather that there isn’t evidence that armed guards lead to a net increase in safety.

I googled two of those. In the first, Pearl High School, the principal did not stop the shooting but helped arrest the shooter once the shooting was over. It’s hard to argue that anyone was “saved”. The second, Shoney’s restuarant, was not a school shooting or any other kind of massacre but was instead an armed robbery. So I’m kind of doubtful of both the applicability of the rest of your examples and I’m curious from where you got that list.

Virginia Tech would be a pretty clear example, since the campus had armed police officers.

https://www.google.ca/search?q=accidental+shooting+armed+guards&oq=accidental+sho&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j0l4.1561j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8

e: Long story short, yes it has happened.

3178

To this immediate point, nah,

Police did not say why the employee was driving the student home about an hour after school ended.

Read more: http://www.wlwt.com/news/local-news/police-student-accidentally-shot-by-schools-armed-guard/-/9837878/20141644/-/nko13o/-/index.html#ixzz2nz4zlMkG
It’s a bit of a stretch, since you’re quibbling about campuses and ignoring four out of six examples and whatnot. You’ve picked an example proximal to the vague idea of armed personnel and extended it out to a single firearms mishap. Certainly if you can find a thread of these there’s a discussion but you’ve quit at a single poor example.

3179

I’m not ignoring anything, I just didn’t feel inclined to read the rest of your examples when those I did read didn’t go to your point.

You’ve picked an example proximal to the vague idea of armed personnel and extended it out to a single firearms mishap. Certainly if you can find a thread of these there’s a discussion but you’ve quit at a single poor example.

Well, all you’ve done is provide anecdotes too. Neither of us has any actual data. I don’t think it’s particularly useful for us each to spend a bunch of time trying to google up the most vaguely similar examples. This is exactly why we should base public policy on actual data, not on gut feelings or assumptions. Unfortunately the NRA appears to do whatever it can to prevent that kind of research from being carried out.

At the end of the day, you’re the one asserting that armed guards make people safer and so the burden of proof lies on you. I don’t know whether armed guards would make people less safe, I just don’t think there is any real data supporting your position, and there is at least a plausible argument that they do not make people safer. I hope we can at least agree that the financial cost alone makes the idea totally shitballs crazy.

3180

Sure we agree on the financials, but armed guards obviously do make people safer, that’s why the industry exists in the first place. Banks use them, courthouses use them, government, casinos, armored car companies, etc. etc. I don’t think their effectiveness can be argued. The question of efficiency is a valid one, but as a net safety positive it’s obvious that guards, well, guard. The cost question just comes down to, are we willing to hire another teacher that doesn’t teach in order to ameliorate the very rare case of a school shooting? Since I know the statistics (and don’t live in Colorado, where there seems to be a cancer cluster of shootings) I wouldn’t bother with an armed guard in the schools, but that doesn’t mean an affluent school shouldn’t have one. It’s a perk, not a negative.

Don’t get me wrong, you could divert that money to, say, proper sex education and have a massively more positive impact on society as a whole. You could divert it to healthier foods and have a more positive impact. No argument there. But if the question is “how do we prevent more shootings?” then armed guards are a valid answer. I’m opposing these knee-jerk proclamations of “it’ll be a bloodbath!” or “The shooter will just hunt down the officer first!” because they’re appeals to ignorance and emotion. Armed individuals have a positive impact when they are present during a shooting.

3181

Look, my objection is pretty simple. I would like to see evidence that armed guards are an effective way of saving lives. If armed guards are obviously effective, then it should be easy to provide sound evidence of that. Absent evidence, my suspicion is that armed guards are generally a kind of security theater and not actually an effective way of saving lives. Of course, armed guards may be more effective in some contexts than others.

I think generally when we talk about public policy we expect that policy to be grounded in research and sound science. I don’t think we should leave that expectation at the door just because a policy issue involves guns. The same applies to gun control measures: there should be sound research before a government enacts (for example) a gun registration scheme.

e: One more for the anecdote pile. While looking for papers on armed guards, I found this gem:

In the 41,000-student Tulsa, Okla., school district, uniformed guards stationed at all public high schools and middle schools are not police officers, but nonetheless carry firearms, said district spokesman John Hamill. The armed guards, which the school system has used for a decade, are provided currently under a contract with Securitas Security Services USA, the Parsippany, N.J.-based division of a Swedish company.

The 65 guards are equipped with handguns, said Bob Currington, the district security coordinator. The number of guards at schools ranges from one to five, based on the circumstances of each school.

“The firearm is there to protect students from bad guys on the outside, not to use on students,” Mr. Hamill said. To underscore the dangers facing schools today, he cited a campus lockdown during a pawnshop robbery near a school two years ago, and another incident in which a criminal suspect fleeing arrest entered and dashed through an elementary school.

In addition, the district deploys nine school resource officers, underwritten by the federal COPS grants, with each one covering several schools.

The security guards all have earned the standard law-enforcement certification in safe weapons use, according to Mr. Hamill. However, a mishap occurred on the only occasion in the past five years in which a guard has taken out his firearm. In October 2002, according to press reports at the time and Mr. Hamill, a guard outside a Tulsa high school saw an expelled student who appeared to be threatening him with a weapon; the guard fired his pistol; the bullet ricocheted and fragments hit another student in the cheek; no weapon was recovered. The district paid a legal settlement to the injured student and his parents.

Trotter, Andrew, “Schools Wrestle With Issue of Armed Guards” (2005) 24 Education Week 1.

3182

I’d caution against use of guards to deter crimes such as robbery and theft as evidence of deterence against crazed loonies. A bank robber is, for the most part, sane. The value of a guard in deterring a school shooter doesn’t neccesarily correlate to a bank guard’s value. You can’t make the assumption based on the existence of bank-type guards, alone, that a school guard will have the same effect.

3183

Not to mention, in many countries armed security guards are illegal (UK and Switzerland, among others) but AFAIK those countries do not experience radically different levels of crime. In my own jurisdiction, security guards are generally not permitted to carry firearms.

3184

There are about 125,000 schools in the US (per a quick google). Putting an armed guard in each one is probably in the $10 billion/ year range (likely a lot more, as some campuses are too big for one guard). There are about 20 - 30 deaths/ year that could theoretically be prevented, if all the guards were successful and there were no accidents. These numbers are all approximate, but I think the orders of magnitude are at least correct.

I tend to believe, even without statistically significant evidence, that armed guards would be somewhat successful. Still, I can’t imagine a circumstance where it makes sense to spend $400 or $500 million per life saved.

3185

There are about 125,000 schools in the US (per a quick google). Putting an armed guard in each one is probably in the $10 billion/ year range (likely a lot more, as some campuses are too big for one guard). There are about 20 - 30 deaths/ year that could theoretically be prevented, if all the guards were successful and there were no accidents. These numbers are all approximate, but I think the orders of magnitude are at least correct.

I tend to believe, even without statistically significant evidence, that armed guards would be somewhat successful. Still, I can’t imagine a circumstance where it makes sense to spend $400 or $500 million per life saved.

3186

Er… ok? I’m not sure how bringing up other countries in a discussion of the US is some sort of point.

“In Somalia they don’t even have schools!!!”
Great, doesn’t really matter though.