Dear Editor:

In 2015, there were about 125,000 public elementary and secondary schools in the United States. Two armed guards per school would provide 250,000 more jobs, at a cost of $9 billion for salaries, and $4 billion for benefits, totaling about $13 billion annually.

In 2015, the Department of Education budget was $77 billion, and nobody knows what good they actually do with all that money.

There have been 576 shooting casualties, including 138 deaths, since Sandy Hook in 2012, or about 85 casualties per year. There are about 300,000,000 guns in this country, and dig a grave first before trying to confiscate just one gun from one owner.

Based on these facts, here is just one simple path forward out of many that would be well worth doing:

1. Repeal all federal laws that designate schools as gun free zones.

2. Cut the DOE budget by just 17 percent to raise $14 billion annually.

3. Offer security funding to every local school district, and let each district choose between arming guards or teachers, or both.

4. If there is a budget shortfall, eliminate just one overpaid $120,000 non-teaching do-nothing administration job per school.

5. Enact federal legislation making any local school that fails to become a secured “hard target” liable for any harm to any student.

Alternatively, we can do nothing, and listen to the same old gun legislation debate after the next school shooting.

Phil Molvar

Southport