I am not sure that I am qualified to blog on this point, but so far, I have not heard from anyone else who seems qualified either. On that basis, I am going to see if I can develop my position so that most of you can understand it.
To keep the emotions out of it, I am going to use the example of a home. This is your home and it has a value of $100,000. This does not count the value of the land. This would be the value for a fire insurance policy. Looking at the statistics, we find that on average you can expect that your home will be destroyed by a fire every 95 years. The first problem is to determine how much money you would have to put into the bank each years earning 3% to have saved up the $100,000 home replacement cost when your home burns down in 95 years. That is how insurance companies look at it and determine your premium. They add in profit, but we will not do that here. Based on the interest tables, you would have to pay $192.58 per year. This is our base line. Next, we need to determine how much it would be worth to change the odds of your home burning down every 95 years to every 100 years. If you don't understand the logic of all this, just wait. It will all come together. Next, we calculate the premium for a 100 year policy. It will be less because the insurance company will not have to pay off so soon or so often. That new number works out to be $164.67. You save $27.91 per year.
Now the good stuff. I don't know how you did it, but some how you figured out how to keep your home from burning down every 95 years to now every 100 years. That is progress, but how much can you afford to spend each year to get that improvement? It turns out to be the same $27.91. If what you did had a cost per year of more than $27.91, then it was not worth doing. You would have been better off by doing "nothing". The main reason that there is so little value in doing something to solve your problem with your home burning down is the fact that it is a "rare" event. What if the modifications to your home had a cost of $100.00 per year? Well, it would not be worth doing.
Here is another point. Notice that your improvements did not make your home 100% fire proof? Most actions you take may make things better, but only by some percentage. In the case of the shooting at the the school in Newtown, no mater what action you take, it can only reduce the frequency of similar events. It can not totally eliminate them. That is one the first mind sets that you have to get used too. I know that most of you can understand the problem with the home, but your emotions get in the way when it is a school shooting. What ever we end up with in gun control or what ever, it is only going to make a "rare" event a little less "rare". We have to have level heads to determine if any of the actions are "worth it" or not. That is the problem with all personal and government expenditures. Are they worth it? I can tell you from my perspective that most are "not".
PS----The other thing that we need to look at is if our actions made something else worse. This is often the case when governmental "do-gooders" get into the picture. In the case of the school shooting and possible gun control, there will be people killed in the future because they were law abiding and had no gun to protect themselves from criminals who will still have guns. If our government can get guns away from criminals "first", they can come and talk to me about giving up my guns. We can't even keep drugs out of prisons and those people are locked up 24 hours a day how can our our government really control guns? Keep a cool head!
