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AlexMennen comments on Gun Control: How would we know? - Less Wrong
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Let's assume that your suggested policy would bring school shootings from about the rate they're at now to 0. I can't imagine the benefit would be much better than that, and it would probably be a lot worse. Wikipedia says that there have been 38 school shooting deaths this year (not including the suicides, and including the recent attack, making it much higher than other recent years). According to this, there are about 3 million public school teachers in the US and they make about $50,000 per year each, so their value of time is probably somewhere around $30/hour, so it would cost about $100 million per year to require all of them to spend an hour per year on the shooting range. If that saves about 40 lives per year, that works out to $25 million per life (Edit: oops, no it doesn't). None of the estimates on wikipedia suggest that lives should be valued at more than $10 million per life. And I haven't even mentioned the costs of equipping the teachers with guns, so the actual cost of the policy is probably much higher. So mandatory firing range time for all teachers is a bad policy under the most ridiculously pro-gun assumptions I could come up with.
We can also look at comparative advantage. If we are dedicating this length of time would ti eb better spent on something else, say teaching them all first aid? I suspect there are significantly more deaths from accidents than shootings.
(Alex scooped me on the obvious "do a back-of-the-envelope calculation" point; below is the calculation I was going to include in the comment I was drafting)
Your numbers don't add. $100 million/year divided by 40 deaths/year is $2.5 million per life, which is well below the accepted value of a life.
$2.5 million is a thousand times greater than the marginal cost of saving a life via effective altruism.
But the lives you'd save via effective altruism are not American lives! ;-)
Yes, but nobody expects government action to be effective.
Oops. You're right. But since I was trying to make the number as low as possible so no one could claim it would be lower, it's still almost certainly well over $10 million/life. If we look at the recent few years, there's been about 10 per year, so if we're still being pessimistic, we have to assume that's a trend and that there'd be about 100 fatalities per year otherwise, putting it at $10 million/life, still just over the value of statistical life. And still almost certainly an underestimate since 1 hour/year of teacher training is a massive underestimate of the cost, there's no way it would send school shooting fatalities to 0, etc. But it's closer than I expected it to be, though.
Based on those kinds of calculations, teacher in service meetings or parent teacher conferences cost more lives than this school shooting.
eta: Not that there isn't a valid point that arming every single teacher, even if effective, would probably be overkill. Having one per x number of students (or x square feet of campus size) would probably be just as effective and not actually require training, as there are likely a few already there. And the guns wouldn't necessarily need to be on their person or in their classroom--just somewhere closer than the nearest police station.
Only if you quietly assume it has nothing to do with the important task of teaching.
Right, that was the implication. I don't think they tend to do much to improve the quality of babysitting. (Okay, somewhat harsh, but I was a teacher.)
but surely even if they did, it wouldn't be enough to justify the cost in strict utilitarian calculations like the above?
I don't know, why wouldn't it be? A high-tech wealthy economy depends on education, with all the direct & indirect returns implied.
Not to mention that certain people might be good at teaching but bad at shooting. (Wild-ass speculation here -- I've never fired a real gun and I have no idea if it's something almost everyone could learn to do decently.)
My impression is that almost anyone can learn to do target range shooting decently, though even then you'd run up against disability issues if you made that level of skill a requirement for teachers.
The hard part is staying calm enough to do something useful (or perhaps anything at all) in a fast-moving violent situation. This can take a lot of training. On the other hand, I haven't heard about any of the teachers freezing at Sandy Hook. On yet another hand, most people have powerful inhibitions against killing, so that might be harder to train than protecting children.
It is very hard to teach people to kill -- a fact that's largely responsible for the lopsided casualty ratios in engagements between well-trained and poorly trained armies. Most of the research that has been done on this is in the context of police and military training, though, where the main motivating factor is not letting your buddies down; I'd expect the psychology to be somewhat different in the context of defending children. Given that teachers self-select for very different psychology than cops or soldiers, though, I'm not sure which way the statistics would end up running.
There are further implications along these lines, too. It's isn't just ability, but willingness: at least some prospective teachers would probably be put off by the prospect of being required to be armed in the classroom.
Not that the job market for teachers isn't glutted, right now, but is "willingness to carry a gun and shoot to kill" really something that we want to select for, in teachers? It would compete with the ability to teach well in determining who actually teaches our children.