I guess we can go on discussing arming teachers, even though we all know this will never happen and there will never be enough willing participants to have a real effect on school shootings. Talk about denial and an imagined emotional effect....
Properly trained and armed school security personell...I get it...nobody wants to pay for it. I already know this. Nobody wants to see an increase in their taxes and schools will fight any attempt to cut their budgets. That is why nothing meaningful is going to come of this tragedy. Tomorrow will be business as usual.
- Shawn
Teachers carrying, whether it will happen or not, will cause exactly the same effect as individuals carrying for their own self-defense. We generally consider this a good thing. As to "never have a real effect on school shootings" this is obviously true unless you can get multiple armed people into a vast majority of schools---unless, of course, you didn't mean to set up a strawman and instead were thinking about specific schools with specific people. As police know quite clearly, having
someone able to react immediately can make a difference.
Not
will make a difference. But
can, at least.
And again, certainly better than
no one.
Speaking personally, I'm not trying to keep everyone in the U.S. safe. I'd be happy to keep just my students safe.
The idea that this is "about denial and an imagined emotional effect...." is quite odd, actually. Don't you train people for CCW? To defend themselves? Do you tell them that you'll train them, but it is really only for emotional effect?
Properly trained and armed school security personell...I get it...nobody wants to pay for it. I already know this. Nobody wants to see an increase in their taxes and schools will fight any attempt to cut their budgets.
This amuses me on many levels.
Let's just take Omaha Public Schools. There are over 80 school buildings just in OPS. I assume you want a security team in each one, since a centralized team would have a response time that would make it useless.
So---80 response teams. Considering that these schools are NOT small (and many are over 1000) I assume that you are planning for at least a 3-man security team for each school. (Obviously it should be higher, but let's attempt to load this in your favor.) Since this is a high-risk job, requiring significant amounts of continual training, let's assume we can hire each person for a bargain price of $40,000 a year (That won't happen, if you want them trained and competent, but again, let's try to load this in your favor). So, you've just added
$9,600,000 to the OPS budget, IF you can hire them (and keep them trained) for that little salary AND you only need 3-man teams for each school.
Do you have any concept of how much money school systems have, use, and are given?
In my school district, we only have 4 buildings, and thus would only need to add $480,000 to our yearly budget for the 12 security folks. Granted, at the high school we currently have a building budget that
literally is smaller than our budget 11 years ago (that is in absolute dollars, not in adjusted-for-inflation dollars, by the way) while our student population is 150% of what it was back then. So, you ARE correct, we don't really want to cut any more of our budget for anything.
I note that amount of money ($480,000) isn't actually realistic, because of course it doesn't take into account actual security requirements such as equipment, gear, training, space for security, additional security adjustments for building infrastructure itself, etc.
Again, I mention: small towns can't even create for themselves SWAT teams. Matter of fact, small towns normally have barely enough police to cover all shifts. And you are saying it would be feasible to have a highly-trained security team in each school building?
That seems a little unlikely.
Have you thought about what type of tax increase (and infrastructure increase) it would take to make that a reality?
Again----certain things in society are soft targets. Unless we want all schools to be small, high-security, and locked (like schools for international diplomat's children and such) that isn't going to change.
So----got any realistic possibilities for us? Or can you come up with any realistic numbers to make your ideas of security teams possible?
