“We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards.”

So said Wayne LaPierre, his voice constricted with indignant rage, at the National Rifle Association’s post-Sandy Hook ask-me-no-questions “press conference.” Elaborating on the point, LaPierre went on:

We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers. Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family—our children—we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it.

I’m loath to admit it, but when I heard LaPierre draw this parallel (I was watching in real time), my first reaction was, “Gee, that almost makes sense. We protect banks, we ought to protect kids, right?”

After I’d thought about it a little, though—after my brain caught up with my gut—the parallel dissolved.

Presidents are protected by armed guards because the probability that a President will be targeted by assassins or would-be assassins is a hundred per cent. Of the twenty-eight men who have served as President since 1860, four, or 14.3 per cent, have been murdered while in office, and there have been credible threats or actual attempts directed against most of the rest, including all the recent ones. Many of these threats arise from “rational” motives, such as protesting the policies of the government or changing its political course.

Members of Congress are not routinely provided with bodyguards, armed or unarmed. However, the Capitol, like the White House, is an obvious, predictable target for politically motivated terrorists as well as for thieves, unruly protesters, and overwrought constituents. That is why there is a Capitol police force.

Banks, or some banks, are protected by armed guards because banks contain large amounts of money. People who bring guns into banks in order to threaten or, if they deem it necessary, shoot bank employees almost always do with the goal of obtaining money and then escaping. So far as I know, there has never been a case of a maniac entering a bank and randomly shooting employees and customers as an end in itself, without regard to the rational, predictable goal of stealing cash.

But there are no “rational” reasons for anyone to do what was done at Sandy Hook. Entering a school and shooting children yields the shooter no concrete benefits and advances, no political or ideological goals the shooter might be imagined to espouse. Every such shooting has been a sociopathic act of twisted despair or toxic madness—a cruelly spectacular way of committing suicide.

The N.R.A.’s proposal to station armed guards in the nation’s elementary and secondary schools—all hundred thousand of them, or all hundred and thirty thousand, if LaPierre means private and parochial schools to be included—would be a singularly wasteful, ineffective, and dangerous way to reduce the frequency and lethality of Sandy Hook-type atrocities. But then, that’s not what it’s designed to do. What it’s designed to do is to divert attention from commonsense ameliorative steps that might, with a great deal of luck, be achievable, such as banning or restricting access to the kinds of rifles, pistols, and ammunition magazines that enable a shooter to fire thirty rounds in as many seconds simply by repeatedly pulling the trigger. (Forget about registering guns the way cars are registered and licensing gun owners the way drivers are licensed. Under our political institutions, ideas like those are hopelessly utopian.) As a desirable (to the N.R.A.) side effect, the proposal encouraged legislators in states like Texas who have been working up bills to let principals and teachers start bringing guns to schools.

It should be noted, though, that the logic of the N.R.A.’s proposal, such as it is, extends far beyond schools. Trying to guarantee safety via armed protection of any venue that might attract a maniac bent on killing as many people as possible before being killed or killing himself would require armed guards in many other places: playgrounds, daycare centers, amusement parks, theatres, shopping malls—anyplace where a shooter might find a crowd.

Under the N.R.A.’s proposal, by the way, the multi-billion-dollar costs of recruiting, training, and arming the new force of armed school guards, which would be roughly the size of the French army, are to be borne by the Federal government—the same Federal government that the N.R.A. normally views as an evil octopus with jackboots on all eight tentacles. In his prepared script for his “press conference,” LaPierre dismissed these costs with a wave of the hand, saying, “With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school?” (Italics his.) The N.R.A. is an important component of the conservative movement. This latest proposal is a striking instance of that movement’s devolution into a cacophony of paranoia and incoherence.

Here’s a better idea. Let’s put a police officer in every gun shop—there are slightly more than fifty thousand—in the United States. That would be half as expensive, and much, much more to the point.

Photograph by Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty.