Popular Nonsense: Armed Vets in Schools
After every school shooting, memes pop up on social media suggesting armed veterans are the solution to stop future violence.
On the surface, this may seem like a simple and smart solution. There are unemployed veterans with combat training living in every community across the country. There are also school shootings that occur almost every week. Put veterans to work in the schools and the shootings will stop, problem solved.
Unfortunately, this proposed solution is more complicated than the meme suggests.
Cost
There are about 248,000 public schools in the United States. The school day starts around 7:00 am. The Columbine shooters arrived early to stage their attack so the armed vets would need to be there when the doors open. After school activities (e.g., sport practice, clubs) run until 5:00 PM. Sporting events last until 9:00 or 10:00 PM and have been the site of shootings including a high school girl shot last year leaving a football game.
The armed veterans are going to be needed from 6:00 AM to 5:00 PM most days (55 hours/week) with an extra 4 hours 2–3 times a week (16 hours/week) for sporting events. A school would need 71 hours of coverage not counting weekend activities.
The required school year is 36 5-day weeks. The meme suggests staffing every school with 3 armed veterans.
71 hours of coverage X 3 armed veterans X 248,000 public school =52,824,000 hours per week
52,824,000 hours X 36 weeks = 1,901,664,000 hours
$15 per hour (barely minimum wage) X 1,901,664,000 hours = $28,524,960,000
$28.5 billion dollars per year to put 3 veterans in every school not counting leave, training, benefits, vacation, weekends, overtime, or summers. That would be roughly half of what Russia spends annually on their entire military and about 4% of the US defense budget. It would also be larger than the combined budget of all 60 Department of Health and Human Services programs supporting children and low income families.
Would schools be safer?
43% of public schools already have an armed security presence (e.g., school resource officer, assigned police officer, contract security).
The deadly school shooting this week in Parkland, FL occurred at a 3,100 student high school with a campus that spans multiple city blocks. The campus has 14 buildings with hundreds of doors and windows. It would be impossible for 3 armed veterans to provide seamless security coverage to the entire campus.
Veterans involved in shootings
While many veterans are proud Americans who would love to protect school children, sadly there are a statically significant number of veterans involved in mass shootings including:
- Texas church shooter Devin Kelley, who killed 26 people, was an Air Force veteran (2017)
- George Jo Hennard, who killed 22 in Killeen, Texas, had served in the Navy (1991)
- Michael McDermott, who shot seven people in Wakefield, Massachusetts, served in the Navy (2000)
- Robert Flores was a veteran of the Persian Gulf war who shot his three nursing professors in Tucson, Arizona (2002)
- Major Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army psychiatrist, killed 13 when he went on a rampage at Fort Hood (2009)
- Wade Michael Page, the white supremacist who killed six at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, had served six years in the U.S. Army (2012)
- Radcliffe Haughton, an ex-marine, killed three women, including his wife, at a spa in Wisconsin (2012)
- Aaron Alexis, another Navy veteran, killed twelve at the Washington Navy Yard (2013)
- Ivan Lopez-Lopez, an Iraq War veteran, killed three at Fort Hood in Texas (2014)
- Timothy McVeigh, whose truck bomb killed 168 in Oklahoma City in 1995, was a veteran of the Persian Gulf War (1995)
The title “veteran” does not exclude someone from violence against civilians. While these are examples of a few bad apples, if 1.3 million veterans are employed 40 hours per week to provide security coverage to 240,000 schools…there might be a few bad apples in that huge bunch.
Employing Armed Veterans in Schools is Not a Solution
It makes a great meme but the reality is that we don’t have $28.5 billion to spend on putting 3 armed veterans in every school. Even if the program was implemented, most schools are too large for 3 people to provide effective security coverage. Veteran status doesn’t exempt the armed guards from carrying out an act of violence themselves.
Overall, schools are very safe places and school shootings are high profile events that are still statistically rare occurrences. Stopping school shootings will require fixing a complex web of social, mental health, legal, and constitutional issues. A bunch of armed veterans are not going to do anything to address that.
David Riedman is the founder of the K-12 School Shooting Database and a nationally recognized expert on school safety.
