The world is moved by money, that's the truth. This will not end.

That scenario entirely relies on:
A. The teacher being racist
B. The teacher willing to shoot a student in front of other students because of the percieved racism
C. The teacher willing to deal with the fallout of shooting an unarmed child/teenager for superficial reasons


This will help prevent students from bringing a gun to school and using it halfway through the day, but if someone came to the school with a gun already drawn, metal detectors will not help in the slightest.

You seem to be holding onto the idea that students keep a gun in their backpacks and start shooting in the middle of class. This is usually not the case. The famous Columbine shooting was preplanned and both students did not arrive at the school to begin classes.
In the Virginia Tech shooting, Seung-Hoi Cho entered the first building at 6:45 am (not exactly classroom hours)
Adam Lanza of the Sandy Hook shooting shot out a window and entered through there, and he wasn't even a student (it was an elementary school).

I still believe metal detectors would make sense to have; as anything is a possibility depending on the school and many other factors.

After reading your post, I do agree on the idea that metal detectors shouldn't be the only security measure entering a school. Security guards would also be another measure that will be more reliable. Fenced campus is also important considering the Sandy Hook and Virginia Tech shootings you mentioned.
My first post was a tad too exaggerated, and isn't realistic. Don't take that as my opinion.

Also, my argument is purely based on ideas. So any evidence to contradict it (or to support it) would be helpful as well.

Al lot of teachers are not prepared to kill or harm a student and they should not learn to do it. Metal detectors might be a slight prevention but will not avoid this type of cases. Some adolescents/kids/academics students will not going to be so stupid to pass through the metal detector with a gun . They probably will find another way. It depends on many things.

Metal detectors aren't really a viable security measure either. Students with belts, glasses, some styles of shoes, insulin distributors, pacemakers (heart issues), fancy pens from their grandparents, cellphones and watches will all need to either take off these items or explain why the detector went off. Do we really want to turn elementary and high schools into TSA checkpoints?

Fences (usually) aren't a good idea either. Children already view school as a prison. Fencing in schools will only reinforce this belief and likely lead to lower grades and morale from the students. It also poses a problem for open campus high schools. Students that want to go out to lunch must spend some time going through a checkpoint in and out, and most of the time, lunch periods are fairly short.

Guards or police officers are the best security measure anyone has proposed in a while. My high school had an officer roaming around the entire four years. Most of his duties included giving stern looks to students that were in the halls during classtime and breaking up fights, but he did have a full utility belt, taser and standard issue Glock 23 included.

I don't think it would be such a good idea. What if some how, a student gets a hold of a teacher's gun. And then he goes on a killing spree within the school? I say no. Metal detectors, more security, and more doors is the best solution in my book.

The price of a life can be roughly estimated to be $129,000, so if you want to know if it is a good idea you need to calculate the average number of deaths in school shooting x $129k then subtract the number of schools in the US multiplied by the cost of protecting such schools with security guards from this. If the value is negative then economically it is a bad move for the country.

It would be interesting to calculate this at some point.
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Did some research, since 1980 there have been 297 deaths as a result to school shootings in the US. This means 8.5 deaths a year. It appears that the number of shootings is increasing so I might underestimate the number of lives taken by shoot shootings in the future.

So if more than 8 (rounded up from 8.48 since the calculation is not accurate enough to justify decimal points) people are likely to die per year in the future, completely successful preventative action would be worth $3,167,000 a year.

There are about 98,817 schools in the US so the economically advisable maximum cost of protection per school is about $32 per year.

However, some states would probably not need school protection because of varying gun laws so this figure is probably a huge underestimation. I think I should have used more recent statistics about school shooting death count (perhaps the increase in number of shootings would make it up to 3 times as much as my estimate) as well as making the number of schools much smaller since security guards would not be required in some schools.

Evaluation of current result: Even if we multiply the figure by 3 the cost of protection per school would have to be below $96 per year, which is impossible to provide complete protection with. This proves that protection for all schools is an untenable proposition and schools should only have protective personnel if the school is particularly at risk of a shooting. This would depend if the gun laws of the state as well as the size of the school.

I will do some more research now and post it when I am done.
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US Police officers have an average salary of about $54,230. Presumably some schools would need more than one officer, but for now we will consider how many schools could be equipped with just one.

The number of schools you could pay for with the price of life which will be lost to school shootings per year in the future could be estimated to be 3 times as much as in the past (I saw a couple articles but you will have to look for them yourself or just take my word for if) which gives a figure of $9,501,000. The number of schools which could be equipped with an officer of average pay is therefore 175. This would be across the whole of the United States. To work out how many could be equipped with 2 officers just half this (88 schools). 175 divided by number of officers = number of schools.

I would once more like to say that these are rough estimates with possibly unrealistic figures (police officers are paid differently depending on state and rank). But I think the statistic is a pretty decent as a rough guideline. If an average of about 1.5 officers was given to the schools in question, the number of schools would be 116 according to these estimates.

What do you guys think about that? Do you think 116 schools could be selected to completely stop school shooting death rates? (If shootings aren't stopped completely the worth in life of the protection would be less so it would not be worth it on an economic level). Would it be better to just look after guns better so mentally unstable people can't get hold if them?
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Just thought I should explain why not to take any of my calculations as fact since the error bounds are probably ridiculously high.

Limitations of Calculation
Did not take into account area specific or state specific data on size of, number of and danger of shooting of at schools or of gun law data and knowledge of police officer salaries for such a job to a similar amount of detail. The balance of these statistics could heavily influence the result either way.
Lack of accuracy when predicting number if shooting deaths in the future due to initially using statistics including outdated data which did not take into account recent increase in shooting deaths. Compensating for this by multiplying by 3 rather than finding the rate of increase and apply this to a suitable period of time to come to find an estimate for average gun deaths in the chosen time period.
Assumed officers would be 100% effective with no reliable evidence to back such an assumption. In fact in hindsight such an assumption is extremely unlikely without much more officers than 1-2 I'm each targeted school.

That is all I could think of. Feel free to mention something I have missed.

I want to bring up this point again, since all of the solutions proposed tackle the symptoms of the issue, not the issue itself. I've said this a few times in different threads here, but when you're looking to fix a problem, you're actions need to be directed at what causes the problem. A good way of thinking about it is that you shouldn't attack the symptoms of a disease, you should attack the disease itself.

In mass shootings, mental illness and antisocial behaviour is what's causing the problem. Actions should be directed at tackling those issues.

Or perhaps not give civilians any guns! It's hard to shoot people without one. Making them illegal to possess makes it harder to have illegal (unregistered, whatever) guns in circulation as well. If all guns are illegal for civilian possession, the issue is quite straightforward to handle. Exception could be hunting rifles, which would require a hunting license (those are not that easy to get where i'm from).

Yeah, I agree. However, there's far too much money and momentum supporting the status quo with respect to guns remaining legal in the US. It's certainly a prudent solution, but it isn't pragmatic.