Putting armed guards in all schools would be prohibitively expensive and it's just not a reasonable response to a small threat. The costs would greatly outweigh the benefits.
I have thought a lot about this issue for years. It is very real to me. When I was a police officer in a small rural town I knew that most likely I would be on my own in an active shooter situation, too much time would elapse before another officer could arrive to go in with me. Just the way things are.
One of my duties in my current job with the sheriffs office is being in charge of security at the courthouse. I know how expensive real security is. I know this is going to sound cold in this emotionally charged atmosphere, but the risk of an active shooter in every school in America does not justify the cost of properly trained and equipped armed security. We already spend more per capita on education then any other industrialized nation.
I am an NRA life member and I will not readily give up anything in a futile attempt to stop mass shootings. But the more I think about it, the more I have to dismiss the proposal to put armed officers in every school as prohibitively expensive.
What can we do then? Gun control will solve nothing, we can't afford to harden our schools and staff them with armed security forces. The solution that has the greatest benefit for our society is to fix our broken mental health system. Back in the 1980s we (as a society) decided that treating the mentally ill by institutionalizing them was cruel and inhumane. And it was expensive. States closed most of their mental hospitals and sanitariums. Advocacy groups pushed an agenda of mainstreaming the mentally ill.
Suddenly we were having a "homeless" problem. Why? Many of the mentally ill who lost their homes in the state run institutions couldn't handle being "mainstreamed". The number of them I dealt with who just refused to avail themselves of the shelter and government housing programs and preferred to live on the street just amazed me. Today our jails are full of mentally ill people who have committed crimes, felonies and misdemeanors both. In many cases they a found unfit to stand trial and committed to a mental institution. The problem is, there are so few beds that they often sit in isolation cells in the county jail for months waiting for a bed to open up. The judges here have taken to issuing a Rule to Show Cause summons to the directors of the state hospitals ordering them to show up in court and explain why these people are still sitting in the county jail months after the court ordered them committed to the Department of Human Services. Usually a bed comes available within hours of the institution being served with one of these orders.
Would fixing our mental health system stop all mass shootings? No, of course not. But I think it would lower the risk tremendously and have the other positive effect of dealing with the homeless problem and the jail overcrowding problem. The benefits to society would be worth the cost.
I'm not sure how much national coverage this story got, but several weeks ago it's possible that a mass shooting was thwarted when the parents of a troubled young man who seems to share many of the problems the sandy Hook shooter had (I will not use his name here), contacted police after he bought an AR15 rifle at Wal-Mart.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/...cle_c34f5471-d12c-5f70-9ced-57d581ab4ac6.html
I would like to know why the Lammers are not guests on every news show. I do know the reason, it's because their story doesn't fit a certain agenda. But this is what we need.