@Paladin3
We’ve had a lot of gun discussions where the term emotional argument gets thrown around. So let’s try and take a non-emotional look at the risk of schools shootings to individuals and a few of the costs associated with them.
- Last year there were 24 school shootings killing 114 people in K-12
- There are approximately 132,800 K-12 schools of all types (public, private, charter, etc)
- With 50.8million students across the US
- With an average enrollment of 528 kids per public school
- There are approximately 3.7million public and private k-12 teachers
- Making an average wage of $28/hour
The risk of being affected by a school shooting:
- For an individual student or teacher last year ~114/(50.8M + 3.7M) = 0.0002% or 1/500,000
- For it happening at an individuals school last year ~ 24/132,800 = 0.02% or 1/5000
So does it make rational sense to do something to prevent school shootings?
One tool to evaluate risk that most industries use is a risk matrix.
To understand the risk you have to assign a consequence and a likelihood.
In any industry a fatality is a catastrophic hazard and rates a 5 (right most column)
Figuring the likelihood is a little more difficult. For an individual with a 1 in 500,000 likelihood that would be a very low risk (row 1) and nothing would need to be done by the individual.
However once you start looking at the risk to a school or schools the likelihood becomes more significant. The likelihood of 1 in 5000 risk to an individual school would be enough to bump the risk from 5x1 to 5x2 or 3.
A school district superintendent whose responsible for many schools (284 as an example from our local urban school district) and that 1 in 5000 risk to school becomes 1 in 20. The chance that one of your schools would be involved in a shooting over the 13 years any given student attends the district then rises to 66%. That’s a 5X5 risk that must have mitigations put in place.
This actually matches well with the aviation industry where if a catastrophic risk occurs anywhere industry wide it would be scored similarly.
Putting mitigations in place makes logical sense. For schools that mean active shooter drills and making schools harder targets.
If we assume every school will have one active shooter drill a year and they cost roughly one hour of instruction that’s 3.7M teachers x $28/hr x 1hr = $100M of lost instruction time per year. It also necessitates explaining to students why there’s a risk of an active shooter and why they must practice for it
So it looks to me like active shooter drills and telling kids they shouldn’t worry but there is a risk of schools shootings is entirely rational. Oh and that minimum of $100M is another cost of how we handle guns in the US.