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Randy_M 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.
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.