Former SecEd Bill Bennett floated a school safety plan today:
Find me the back of an envelope, will you?
There are nearly 100,000 schools in the United States. I think you're going to need way more than 100,000 armed public safety officers to cover all those schools, but let's be conservative and keep the number for our purposes.
You need to pay these people, give them benefits (heaven forbid!), train them, equip them, and so on. I think a very conservative estimate would be $100,000 per officer per year.
That's $10,000,000,000 - ten billion dollars - every year to have a dedicated, armed officer in every public school in America. Again, it's probably more - a lot more.
We spend around half-a-trillion dollars a year on public education. So, to put an armed officer in every school in America, we'd need to increase our total spending on K-12 schools by at least 2%.
Does that make any sense to you? Keep in mind, there is no guarantee that an armed guard at Sandy Hook Elementary would have stopped this heavily-armed man in combat gear who was suicidal.
I think I'd rather take that $10 billion and put it into universal mental health care.
(Whoops, messed up my digits first time around...)