(my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements)
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.
I don't know how to keep this topic away from http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ , so I'm just going to exhort everyone to try to keep this about rationality and not about politics as usual. I myself have strong opinions here, which I'm deliberately squelching.
So I got to thinking about the issue of gun control in the wake of a recent school shooting in the US, specifically from the POV of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot. Please limit discussion to that *specific* issue, or we'll be here all year.
My question is not so much "Is strict gun control or lots of guns better for us [in the sole context of minimizing presumed-innocents getting randomly shot]?", although I'm certainly interested in knowing the answer to that, but I think if that was answerable we as a culture wouldn't still be arguing about it.
Let's try a different question, though: how would we know?
That is, what non-magical statistical evidence could someone give that would actually settle the question reasonably well (let's say, at about the same level as "smoking causes cancer", or so)?
As a first pass I looked at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate and I noted that the US, which is famously kind of all about the guns, has significantly higher rates than other first-world countries. I had gone into this with a deliberate desire to win, in the less wrong sense, so I accepted that this strongly speaks against my personal beliefs (my default stance is that all teachers should have concealed carry permits and mandatory shooting range time requirements), and was about to update (well, utterly obliterate) those beliefs, when I went "Now, hold on. In the context of first world countries, the US has relatively lax gun control, and we seem to rather enjoy killing each other. How do I know those are causally related, though? Is it not just as likely that, for example, we have all the homicidally crazy people, and that that leads to both of those things? It doesn't seem to be the case that, say, in the UK, you have large-scale secret hoarding of guns; if that was the case, they'd be closer to use in gun-related homicides, I would think. But just because it didn't happen in the UK doesn't mean it wouldn't happen here."
At that point I realized that I don't know, even in theory, how to tell what the answer to my question is, or what evidence would be strong evidence for one position or the other. I am not strong enough as a rationalist or a statistician.
So, I thought I'd ask LW, which is full of people better at those things than I am. :)
Have at.
-Robin