The Newtown Tragedy has created a news over load. Most people feel that the media should just back off and let the people of Newtown do their private grieving. I don't want another media person to push a microphone in the face of one of the parents and asking them how they feel or telling them that they understand their pain. I have have had enough, but there are some things that we could discuss, like "what is a life worth". Don't hang up. This is something that we all need to talk about.
People every where are calling for the government to "do something". I don't have a problem with that, but I do want to apply some logic to any action that is taken. Rather than answering the question of, "what is a life worth", we can work backwards to the answer. What do I mean, you can calculate what a life is worth? Yes! Let's take the case of the Newtown shooting and apply a few numbers to the situation. School shootings in the USA amount to about 25 deaths per year on average. You can pick another number if you want. That is the base line. First, let's consider some kind of serious limit on gun ownership. Let's say that we could reduce gun ownership by about 25%. Remember that we don't even do that well on cocaine. What do you estimate that would cost? My guess is about $500,000,000 per year. This is not a one time cost. My most optimistic estimate is that it would reduce school shooting deaths by no more than 20% or 5 deaths. See, now we can calculate what a life is worth. Divide the $500,000,000 by 5 and you get the value of a life is $100,000,000.
Many of you say that a life has no value or an infinite value, but I showed above that a life would have to worth $100,000,000 to justify aggressive gun control. But wait! If we take 25% of the guns away, I can assure you that 99% will come from law abiding citizens not criminal types. That means at least more than 10 people will be killed by criminals because they did not have a gun to protect themselves. The bottom line is that we spend $500,000,000 each year and piss off many of our good law abiding citizens. In the process we end up with 5 more deaths rather than a net savings of 5 as the "one movers" expected.
A side note. Who is Truman Capote? The guy who became famous by writing the book "In Cold Blood". The book about the couple who killed the farm family for no reason and for no gain. The only one who did gain was Truman Capote. Isn't it also interesting that most of you know of Truman Capote and his book, but not the name of the family who were killed. My prediction is that this tragedy will end up the same. Some writer will become famous by writing a book about this whole thing and again, most of you will not know the names of the kids who were killed. Isn't America great, or what?
