NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre made the serious suggestion that instead of pursuing gun control on a national scale Congress should instead pay for police officers to patrol every school in the United States.

That is a somewhat expensive proposal, as we'll soon see.

The median annual pay for a police officer in 2010 was $55,010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There were 98,817 public schools during the 2009-2010 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics

If you were to install one full-time cop at each and every school in the United States, it would cost more than $5.4 billion.

It's not clear if the NRA wants just one, or more.

Here's how much it would cost to pay for a certain number of cops in every school in the United States:

It may be somewhat difficult to convince Congress to spend several billion dollars to carry out this proposal instead of the comparably cheaper alternative of gun control.

Watch more on this argument below.