You don't need an MBA on staff to have access to exquisitely sophisticated risk management tools. Thanks to the miracle of competing insurance companies, underwriting expertise is constantly available to reduce to a fungible figure all the imponderable interacting risks that attend any activity.

This figure, of course is your annual premium.

Public policy, moreover, may profitably incorporate the wisdom of the market thus distilled, to guide us through a thicket of decisions like, should we license that nuclear power plant, should we build houses in this potential flood plain, and should we arm schoolteachers to reduce the risk of Newtown like massacres.

The answers as delivered by insurance companies competing for our premium dollars yet mindful of the possible payout when a risk " matures" ( as it were):

 "No"  to the nukes absent government backstops. 

"No" to the flood insurance at any price.

"Maybe" to the armed teacher but at a price that says we are more at risk from the proposed remedy than from the harm it is directed towards averting. Hence, school boards once eager to see teachers strapped, now find themselves strapped for the cash to insure what trained underwriters conclude is additional, not diminished risk.

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" may make sense on a bumper sticker, but when paid professionals actually think through the pros and cons, the answer as found in an insurance quote shows that La Pierre and his acolytes are simpletons.

But you already knew that.