Hardening schools is back in the news so I thought I would dust off this post from the last election cycle.
My schools days, the late 1960s to mid 1970s, had some demonstrations and sit-ins but they were very inconsequential at least compared to the current high school activism. I applaud their grit and determination and hope that they will learn from it and be anxious to shape the politics around them in the 2020 election cycle.
I also applaud their teachers who helped instill a sense of citizenship and critical thinking. According to the US department of education the public school systems employe around 3.2 million teachers. If I heard correctly our president said he thinks 20% of these teachers should be armed and ready to protect the students. Using my critical thinking, that means developing a group of 640,000 teachers who are armed, trained, vetted and compensated. I need something to with which to compare that to. In 2017, the US Marine Corp had around 186,000 active duty and 38,000 reserve Marines. So to implement this idea and see if it provides the safety intended we would need to develop a killing force three times the size of our Marine Corp and station it in our schools.
To make such an investment a risk assessment must assuredly be done. Those who are trained with handguns know a lot about the risks. You take all of those risks, however small, and spread them across a population of 640,000 in close proximity to children and the probability of something bad happening is near a certainty. However risk models are all about historical data and models. One of the many risks is teachers committing suicide at school. Sadly it is not far fetched, according to a report from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics from 2011-2013, 47% of all suicides in the work place were the result of shooting. In the same report if gives a formula for a metric called propensity ratio that is used to compare groups and their workplace suicides rates. A higher number indicates a higher propensity for a group to commit workplace suicide. Local government Education Services (Teachers) propensity is 0.97 with 6 reported suicides as compared to Federal Government National Security(military) which is 4.27 with 46 suicides and the propensity for security guards is 1.96 with 19 reported suicides. What does that say about putting 20% of our teachers into armed security roles. To me any risk model would sadly show an increase in teacher gun suicides at schools.
Critical thinking shows arming 20% of teachers is not only fiscally impractical, but also a detrimental effect on the risk to students from gun killings generally.
