Dissection of an argument.

Yesterday, I came across this particular picture on Twitter.  It was brought to my attention when @ShawnTheAtheist retweeted it as a means of discussing a particular point contained therein.

Now, like anyone, I want to put an end to as much gun violence as possible.  However, there are several problems with this scenario, and I'd like to address a few of them in this post.

Let's start with some facts.  Sources: NCES 2014-2015 for public schools information, The United States Veterans Administration for all veteran-related data.  CAPE for private schools information.  Also, here is a quick NCES index including mixed statistics.

There were approximately 98,217 public schools in operation for year 2014-2015.  There were approximately 50 Million students enrolled in those public schools.  We must add in an additional 30,861 private schools (with approximately 5.27 million students, 2011-2012 school years).  We must then add in all Post-Secondary Title IV institutions, around 7,234 (which involves another 20.6 million students).

According to the VA, there was approximately a 6.9% poverty rate among veterans, totaling 1.47 million veterans.

Raw numbers crunch

This gives us a total of 136,312 schools (the graphic says 'every school,' and indeed mass shooting happen at every type of school) with a total population around 62.5 million students.  On average (and we can use averages here), that means that there are 458.5 students in each school.  However, some of those institutions have far more than that number, and several will have perhaps only a few dozen.  On average, that's about 115 students per person protecting them.  Now, in some schools, those four people will be protecting perhaps 28 people (as in Mackinac Island, Michigan).  Virginia Tech has a modest 31,000 students, compared with Ohio State University's 64,000 for example.

But ignoring the burden some of them would have, let's assign four per school.  That gives us approximately 545,250 veterans we would need to enlist for this job.  That's approximately 1/3 (37%) of the impoverished veterans. Using information from the Census and crossed with the information from the VA, we can see that 9.3 Million veterans are aged 65 or older.  4.8% of that number is 446,000.  That is 30% of our total candidates.  Roughly half that number are disabled.  Of the ideal age group, approximately 18-34, there are only around 1.6 million total veterans, and with a poverty rate of only 11.9%.  This means that, at maximum, 190,000 potential candidates, of whom 14% or so are disabled.  So, this means, that of our approximately 545,000 veterans necessary to serve in this role, a maximum of around 170,000 can possibly come from veterans under 35 years old.  

Hours and Wages

Citing this page specifically for some facts.  The maximum average school day for primary and secondary education falls right around 7 hours.  We can safely presume that at least an additional hour or two would be necessary for the average day, as students would be arriving and leaving before and after this time.  We need also to remember that students gather at times outside of this normal schedule, for any number of extra-curricular activities.  Luckily, the school year is only around 180 days.  Unfortunately, this doesn't include weekends.  We can presume that the majority of schools are going to have activities from approximately 7am to perhaps later than midnight (sporting events, dances, social events, band practice, FFA, library access, debate club, teachers and faculty preparation, and so forth).

Let us then presume that we need to cover perhaps 16 hours a day, 9 months per year.  We can presume that the average person over 65 years old is not going to be able to withstand 16 hour days for very long, so we'll need to have shifts set up.  If we presume a four-hour shift per person (remember, four people per school, not per shift), we get 1,248 hours per year.  That's 1,080 hours per year per person.  If we presume a simple $10 per hour with absolutely no benefits (although, working in a public school, that number's likely to be much higher with full benefits), the cost of a single employee would be around 10,800 per year.  Extrapolated to 545,250 is approximately 5.9 billion dollars per year, not including administrative costs.  To put that in perspective, the entire department of education only had a budget of 71.2 billion last year.  

Training and Certification

We will need to institute a system of qualifying what kind of people should and should not be included in the roster of potential candidates for these positions.  First and foremost, there would most certainly need to be psych evals for anyone interested, in exactly the same way as typical law enforcement would have to perform.  If we were not careful and stringent here, it would be no better than simply arming anyone and letting them roam the schools freely.

Apart from the massive cost this would add, there would also be a significant waiting period.  Evaluating and certifying 545,000 people would not be a fast task.  This could potentially take years.  

Large vs Small government

The typical argument for this sort of action is that laws simply aren't enough.  Essentially, expanding the influence of government via legislation is seen as the antithesis to this idea.  However, this would be one of the most disruptive things to the idea of minimizing government regulations.  It's terribly hard to argue that the government is ineffective and should be limited (because, as they argue, new laws are ineffective or something, even though we've not really had new laws in a long time), while attempting to force that same government on every individual, increasing the oversight of that government.

The other side of this argument is that criminals are simply going to be criminals, so new laws will be ineffectual.  The counter to this argument is as above, stating that somehow having guards (a police presence, etc) will deter criminals.  This has simply proven to be wrong in the past as well.  Laws, much like the presence of guards, will deter only the people it will deter.  Also, this standpoint is actually a beautiful argument for why removing gun laws and not posting guards is a great idea.  If the simple presence of guns is enough, then simply let everyone carry a gun.  It's not a great argument, per se, but it's at least logically consistent.

Average School Size

The average school is a pretty big place.  There are typically more than just a couple entrances to any given school.  It's going to be nearly impossible for four people to cover a school of most any size.  This is compounded by the fact that at any given time, there will likely be only one person on patrol at any given time.  A single person cannot effectively patrol and respond to situations in a timely fashion in a building that spans potentially a square mile or more in some cases.  This is just an exercise in futility.

Alternative Viewpoint

As anyone with a cursory knowledge of history of our country can attest, the simple fact that someone is a veteran does not automatically endear them to this cause.  The Fort Hood incident brings this to the forefront for this specific argument.  This also brings us back to the evaluation part.

Most veterans, like most people in general, are wonderful people.  Within every group there are going to be deviants, and we typically can't hold a given facet of a person as a reason they commit crimes like this.  The main problem we have is mental health initiatives.  The people who commit these crimes are not representative of the groups others might try to label them as.  We need to recognize that it's time to invest in making this country as healthy as possible.  Each person who has committed a crime like this has been shown, in hindsight, to be suffering from some sort of debilitating mental illness.  PTSD, depression, and other severe disorders can cause people to act violently.  Often times these behaviors will be ignored.  I argue that this is the essential root cause.

So, instead of spending upwards of perhaps 10 billion dollars on putting guards in schools (that's not the only place shootings happen, for example), perhaps we could spend that money on mental (and physical) healthcare.  Part of fixing mental health is getting people into better situations.  

I urge everyone to take a step back, and not rush to such quick judgement.  We need to discuss this like the civil country we are.  We need to help fix this ailment as best we can, as a group.  Divisive language every time these incidents happen is not helping the issue.  Staunch opposition to anyone who disagrees with oneself is not helping.  It may be that we need more than one thing.  More regulations doesn't mean stripping every gun from America.  Arming every public school in America doesn't mean we can't think about working on mental health initiatives, or maybe introducing regulations in other areas.  This sort of false dichotomy is ruining our ability to think as rational people.

Can we now start working toward a better America?  I hope so, for the sake of us all.  Remember most of all, the people you're shouting at online are real people.  We can do this, America.  I believe in us.

Gun Control

This is going to be a bit more on the editorial side, so please bear with me.

Gun control and regulation is a topic that is at the forefront again, as I suspect it shall be for a long time.  This is not an easy topic to digest, mainly because it's got so many factors working into it.  Specifically, this is in reference to the latest mass shooting (and it's a sad indicator when I don't even have to mention which one because in two days there will be another, statistically).  People will naturally want to discuss gun control, because guns are used quite a bit in these events.  However, I think it's necessary that we look at factors other than simply regulating guns, and here's some reasons why.  Please feel free to discuss them in the comments, remembering to keep it civil.  This is the internet, and you're probably going to disagree with some of the points I make.

This post is spurred by a conversation I was engaged in recently on twitter, but its components are basically the same in most debates of this nature.  Specifically, let me address the issue of safe firearm storage first.

This seems like a logical thought, locking up a firearm makes it safer.  I would argue that anything less than a bolted-down safe (or a very heavy one) is probably not going to deter the average thief.  Locking up ammunition and guns to protect children, and to prevent accidental discharge, is one thing.  Trigger locks aren't nearly as effective in the hands of people who steal your guns.  If someone is determined enough to enter your locked house, I'm fairly certain same person could easily disable a locking mechanism on your gun.  There are technologies coming up to make it harder to use guns, like smart lock tech, however it's going to be nearly impossible to make enough of those locks at a reasonable enough price to safeguard every gun.  This also assumes that people would want such a thing, and I'm fairly certain that people who already have illegally obtained firearms aren't going to get much use out of them.

Which leads to my second observation.  Yes, locks can help.  Any deterrent is useful, and even locking half the guns currently in existence, and mandating all new guns have these sort of safety features, would indeed cut down on some gun crime.  However, I think it safe to presume that it's still not going to greatly deter people who want to find unlocked guns.  This also brings up another point, that a gun is not a difficult thing to fabricate.  A firearms registry might help a bit, and it's clear that most mass shootings are happening with automatic rifles.  This reduces the number of guns we would need to identify and lock/register.  However, as we've also seen, several of these incidents happen with the use of more traditional rifles, handguns, and shotguns. 

Moving back to the lock argument, I think there's another facet that's typically overlooked.  Lots of people, including many who advocate for less restriction on gun control, claim it is for a purpose loosely defined as 'self-defense.'  This can include anything from protecting your home from armed invaders, to protecting yourself in public from the selfsame individuals perpetrating mass shootings and armed robberies, et cetera.  Locking a gun in a cabinet defeats this purpose pretty directly.  A trigger lock makes the gun fairly useless for home defense.  Smart lock technology would certainly negate most of this effect, but for now, most guns don't have fingerprint scanners built into grips. 

Another argument that was brought up was that the owner of the gun should be held responsible.  I think this is, at least in part, a good idea. I also think it would be difficult to enforce, for various reasons.  Some people compare it to licensing cars.  Make every gun registered and criminals will be more quickly apprehended.  I'm completely for a gun register, and I think it's a good idea.  I think there's several hurdles to overcome first.  For example, in no particular order:

• Unlike a car, you can't see the gun's license/serial number easily when it's used in a crime.  
• Car tags work because we can see them, and car styles are fairly unique
• Most handguns are black, and it's difficult to tell one caliber from another when it's pointed at you, let alone get its license number.
• There are lots of unregistered guns
• Taking a near-complete census of every gun in circulation today would be impossible.
• Guns aren't nearly as easy to find as cars after a crime.  
• Stolen guns would take a lot of paperwork to track.
• Even if your gun was reported stolen, it's trivially simple to remove most serial numbers.
• This means it would be hard to prove which stolen gun is yours.  
• We could have a ballistics sample of every gun on file as well, but that would be incredibly costly, especially considering most guns aren't used in crimes, and lots of times guns used in crimes aren't fired.
• What, exactly, constitutes a gun?
• A paintball gun can be just as lethal as a regular firearm if you use appropriate-caliber shot.
• Air rifles, crossbows, slingshots, and a plethora of other types of weaponry can potentially be as dangerous as firearms, and are largely unregulated.  If traditional firearms suddenly became much more heavily regulated, one could argue that these sort of weapons would overtake traditional firearms in these roles.   
• Granted, this doesn't appear to be a concern at present, but some people do indeed use air rifles, airsoft guns, and other non-firearms to commit crimes.  Similarly, it provides a good exercise in demonstrating just how hard it is to regulate something that is not very well regulated at present.

Again, I'm not arguing against registration.  Although, in my state, a background check is required, and the serial numbers of most of the guns I own should already be in a database somewhere in some governmental office in my state anyway.  Registration isn't really even the hard part.  There are numbers out there demonstrating that there are perhaps 320 million guns in America, that we know about.  I'm willing to guess that this number is considerably lower than the actual.  I would guess that there are potentially twice that number.  There are around 240-260 million registered vehicles in America, by comparison.  Registering and tracking 320 million guns, plus the approximately 5.5 million new ones per year (we don't do this with cars, but we'd almost certainly have to do it with guns) would require a massive undertaking.  Not to mention the number of guns imported, that's a lot of guns.

However, all this aside, I think there's bigger issues to deal with.  Mental health is definitely one of them.  America doesn't do very well at the healthcare thing, for several reasons which I won't get into here.  We have the Affordable Care Act now, and we could certainly stand to spend a bit more of the VA, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare and other social service money on making sure people are healthy mentally, as part of routine services.  Granted, this might require something of an overhaul of our taxation/spending scheme, but I think it's far from impossible to guarantee every American access to affordable or free healthcare, without hurting working individuals.  I'll touch on this idea, as well as others, in another post. 

Gun law reform, and gun control legislation is definitely necessary.  The proposition is not to remove guns from the hands of everyone (although Switzerland does pretty well with there scheme), but to regulate the firearms industry.  I think the above points I've made are valid, and I think we could easily overcome some of the problems up there if we were willing to tweak other areas of our policy.  However, that might come across as a bit socialist, and for whatever reason, we are quite hesitant to approach that.  I will leave my socioeconomic ramblings to another post, but suffice to say, a more socialist governance policy is not necessarily a bad thing, and is perhaps necessary to the next stage of fixing this problem.  Access to better healthcare, attempting to eliminate poverty, increasing standards of living and enabling people to get help they need before this kind of thing happens, is perhaps not the worst possible outcome.  We can't do it with our current structure, but I don't think that means we shouldn't be open to changing the current structure, including more regulation on guns.  I'm saying this as a gun owner, no less. 

If you have any points, feel free to post them in the comments below.  Again, let's try to keep it civil, and have a good debate.  I'm not sure there's an easy solution, or even a 'right' solution, but I'm sure there's a way to improve things if we can work together.  Just because we may disagree on some things doesn't mean we can't work together.  I'm willing to compromise if it means a better future for the next generation.  Are you?