Strange non-sequitur. Obviously, banning abortion and gay marriage would be bad for society.
OK. However, it's not clear how many lives that would save. When you compare us to peer nations you'll find that non-firearm homicides here are about three times as common, but that total homicides are about nine times as common. That suggests that about 1/3 of the problem is things like culture and poor mental health treatment, while 2/3 is guns.
There's always apoplectic sputtering among gun enthusiasts when one brings it up, since it's such an obvious problem with trying to interpret the "right to bear arms" as an absolute right that cannot be infringed. Deep down pretty much everyone agrees that the government can and should decide which arms people get to bear. We just disagree about the details of which it should be banning. That's an uncomfortable point for the gun enthusiasts to grapple with, so they'd rather just throw their hands up in indigitation and incredulity when the point is made, and pretend that somehow erases the point. But it doesn't. The fact remains nearly all of us support drawing a line SOMEWHERE, in the spectrum of escalating arms. And that tears away the absolutist pretensions of the gun nuts and focuses the debate on more practical considerations of cost/benefit analysis for any proposed dividing line.
My analysis of cost-per-life-saved from paying for enhanced school security actually UNDERSELLS my point. I used 130,930 as the number of schools when calculating costs of security, yet when calculating school shooting averages, I used a figure that includes university shootings like the big one at Virginia Tech. So, that error would give us a "cost per life saved" that's too low. In reality, I should have subtracted out the college shootings, which would give us even fewer "lives saved" for the cost.
My point also undersells costs in that the 130,930 figure is the number of institutions, rather than buildings, and if you were to try to solve this with guards and security doors, etc., buildings are really the more relevant consideration. For example, one local high school I know effectively has two "campuses" -- one is the main building, and the other is a vocational education building, physically separated by some distance to reduce the distraction from noisy heavy machinery running. Schools with multiple large buildings are common, and some schools have a hell of a lot more than just two buildings, too. Like this one looks like it has about 17 buildings of significant size:
https://www.exeter.edu/about-us/our...y is located,placed prominently at the center.
One guard isn't going to cut it, there. So, any solution based around physical security of that sort is either going to have a MUCH higher per-school cost, or will cover a lot less than 100% of school buildings (and thus have no chance of getting rid of all or even most school shootings). So, either way, that greatly drives up the cost-per-life-saved. A more realistic figure might be about $1 billion per life saved -- in the context of countless other ways to spend our money that would save more like one life for every $10 million. It's horrendously inefficient.
