Writing for The National Memo, David Cay Johnston, a columnist for Tax Analysts and former columnist for Reuters, has crunched the numbers and found that the NRA’s proposed “school shield” program would cost almost $35 billion per year.
By counting the nation’s 99,000 public schools, 33,000 private schools, and 7,000 colleges, Johnston calculated the cost of employing security guards using fairly conservative estimates such as only being present on campus for 40 hours a week to arrive at his final figure.
Using the median pay of police, assigning two officers to each school for 50 hours a week would cost $16.3 billion annually just for salaries. Of course we would need many more guards because many are, like the school I attended long ago, open. [...]
Armed school guards will not have as many extra demands on them as street police, but they will have some. Instead of 19 hours of actual guard work in a 40-hour week, let’s assume 35 on patrol and five on paperwork, training and the like.
That means about 6,000 hours of paid time are needed for two guards at each school for 50 weeks a year, the equivalent of 2.9 full-time guards for minimal coverage.
That brings the total salaries to $23.5 billion annually without considering all the large or open schools that would need many more guards.
But there’s more. Fringe benefits, employer payroll taxes and other benefits typically boost the cost of compensation by 30 percent, bringing total compensation to $30.5 billion.
Then, after factoring in the overhead costs associated with properly training and hiring security guards, which the NRA committee report itself recommends a minimum of 40 to 60 hours of training, Johnston arrives at the figure of $34.6 billion.
Using a widely applied rule of thumb in business, let’s conservatively estimate overhead at a 10 percent add-on.
The cost, so far, comes to $34.6 billion per year for consultants, pay, fringe benefits and overhead. That’s almost $450 per student per year.
Fencing, monitoring gear and lost time at checkpoints would be in addition.
Johnston goes on to note that even this is a conservative estimate and does not include the cost of things such as liability insurance, the possibility that the guards themselves may be shot, or that they may shoot the wrong person, scenarios which would carry their own additional costs.
Keep this in mind if any of our various congresscritters endorse the NRA’s proposal while decrying out of control government spending.
You can read the full 3 page post from Johnston here.
Update... this post has been corrected to properly reflect Johnston's current employer.