I don't mean to imply that any person's life is not valuable, especially when we are talking about very young children, but to say that we need to spend trillions of dollars to ward off the extremely rare possibility that a student will be killed during a school shooting does not make sense. Assuming a low figure of $100,000 in security measures per school and that there are around 150,000 school buildings in this country, you are looking at a trillion dollars to secure against something that rarely happens.
What are the chances that even 1 student will die in a school shooting at a K-12 school? My rough estimate looking at the number of students that have attended school over the last 5 years and factoring the number of students who have been killed by a shooter, the chances are about 1 in 10 million. Considering the number of children killed by other means... car accidents, drownings, etc, I would rather that expensive measures be utilized in those areas where the occurrence of a child's death is much more likely... and any money spent will have a much greater impact.
This is not to say nothing needs to be done, rather what needs to be done is more than security theater. Most of the measures mentioned above can be easily thwarted by a person slipping through behind someone walking through a door.
One way would be by allowing there to be a possibility of anyone who wishes to use a firearm to kill a large number of people to actually meet armed resistance. Instead of asking people to be passive and to herd children into a very small area where a shooting is like shooting fish in a barrel, let there be people already in the school prepared to meet and repel the attacker with a tool proven to be rather effective: a firearm. I'm not advocating every teacher be armed, but a few per building would be more than enough. Rifles locked in secure areas throughout the building might also be advisable.
Although this is little comfort to the parents of the children who were killed...or even parents anywhere else, the travesties like what occurred in CT is, fortunately, a very rare event. That's why it is called "news".
As rare as it is, implementing inexpensive but effective responses will have a much larger effect than throwing money at a problem that will unfortunately still occur no matter what we do. But, by allowing those teachers or staff willing to be armed to have the means to decrease the number of people who die during any event, we can certainly reduce the death toll.
