General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Sen. Boxer proposes deploying National Guard at schools [View all]exboyfil
(17,857 posts)The cost is still on the order of $10B/yr. With National Guard you are also going to have to find substitutes when the Guard are supposed to be at training during the week. They will also have to be trained to be guards (National Guard is trained to be soldiers first - not the same thing at all).
In terms of a regulated pool of talent, they do make sense for consideration. Given what we ask from the Guard (and our active duty military service), I think having them near our children is a good thing.
Since the last public school shootings with fatalities we had before Sandy Hook were as follows:
Sandy Hook 12/12 - 26 killed
Chardon 2/12 - 3 killed
Weston 9/06 - 2 killed
Platte Canyon 9/06 - 2 killed
Essex Elementary 8/06 -2 killed
Red Lake 3/05 - 8 killed
Rocori 9/03 - 2 killed
Red Lion 4/03 - 2 killed
Santana 3/01 - 2 killed
Columbine 4/99 - 15 killed
Presupposing that the guard would have stopped all of these shootings (which is not necessarily a good assumption since the numbers include the suicide at the school as well).
In other words if we had been spending $10B/yr in today's dollars after Columbine, each life would have cost approximately $4B to protect (assuming 100% effectiveness). Many of the 2 killed include a suicide so chances are those would not have been effective either.