School shootings are hard to stop because there are "too many entrances" to campuses, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) suggested in a Friday news conference.
Patrick was offering one "creative" preventative measure in response to the Friday shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, that left 10 dead. He said that lawmakers should reconsider future campus designs and possibly retrofit schools to minimize the number of doors.
"There are too many entrances and too many exits to our over 8,000 campuses in Texas," said Patrick. "There aren't enough people to put a guard at every entrance and exit ... Maybe we need to look at limiting the entrance and the exits into our schools so that we can have law enforcement looking at the people who come in one or two entrances."
He also responded to the inevitable criticism that funneling hundreds of students in and out of a single door could be a logistical nightmare, suggesting that schools stagger their start times so that students could flow in and out smoothly. "We're going to have to be creative, we're going to have to think outside the box," he said. He described the Santa Fe gunman as a student who entered the building in a long coat on a 90-degree day, implying that guards could have flagged him as suspicious.
"Had there been one single entrance possibly for every student," said Patrick, "maybe he would have been stopped."