Back in the '70s, it must've been, Archie Bunker was a cultural icon. Played by Carroll O'Connor, a Hollywood journeyman who was, in fact, a leftie of the old school, Archie was the paterfamilias in a situation comedy in which the gimmick was his recurring arguments with his son-in-law. The son-in-law's name is lost, at least to me: Archie called him "meathead," because he was a classic liberal while Archie was an unreconstructed bigot at a time when that was still common enough to be funny.
The 70s were the heyday of airplane hijackings, the safe kind where the airplane actually landed, eventually. So hijacking was an issue; and Archie's solution, the subject of a vehement argument in one episode, was to "arm all your passengers." No hijacker would dare try anything if he knew that there were 100 or 200 guns on the plane.
Archie was played as satire; but it is worth noting that many viewers missed the satire and agreed with Archie, on this as on many other issues.
The President of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, said today that the solution to "a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Every school in the country, he said, should have an armed guard; and Congress should immediately appropriate the necessary funding.
So, let's see, here: according to the "Back 2 School Stats" from the National Center for Education Statistics, there are about 99,000 public schools in the U.S. To make the arithmetic easier, and noting that private schools are not included here, let's say one armed guard for each of 100,000 schools. On one NPR broadcast today, I heard someone estimate a cost of $85,000 per armed guard, counting salary, benefits, equipment (the gun!), the entire training and supervision infrastructure.
So, that's $8.5 billion. Per year. Add private and parochial schools and we are clearly talking, say, $15 billion or so. But what the hey: spare no expense to protect our children.
But schools aren't chosen by wackos because of an animus against education; they're chosen because a reliably dense supply of people can be found there. Churches work, too; witness this year's shooting at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee (the doofus thought the Siks were Moslems). So, while we're at it, we'd better protect the churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, meeting houses, and so on, too.
The Hartford Institute for Religion Research tells us that the best estimates say there are about 300,000 religious congregations in the U.S. Of course, most of those only have significant attendance once or twice a week, so let's estimate that we could do with part-timers to cover them. Maybe 50,000 to 100,000 full-time equivalents (this is complicated in that the vast majority of congregations meet at more or less the same time, so we would have to have a lot of part-timers).
But then, what about all the other places people congregate? Movie theatres, for instance, and shopping centers, and sporting events. We'd better have armed guards --lots of them, because these places have a lot going on, lots of entrances, lots of different people in charge, to varying degrees.
I expect we are going to need, maybe, a half-million armed guards, more than the police and private guards we already have. After all, we've got to have an adequate supply of good guys with guns, because, as Mr. LaPierre said, there are bad guys out there, with guns.
But I wouldn't be surprised if we could handle the whole thing for around $50 billion per year, which is chump change. Maybe we could even save on that, if we used, you know, community-watch volunteers.
Like that guy --Zimmerman?-- in Florida. We could just deputize them all. So, pretty much everywhere we would go, there would be a friendly, helpful, competent, well trained government employee keeping us safe. And don't forget, we'd all have guns of our own!
And it would be easy to pay for: just raise the price of every bullet sold, by the necessary amount.
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