Just hours after the nation’s latest school shooting, the debate began anew:
Are American schools built in a way that makes them easy targets? Are there too many windows, too many entrances and exits and too few security features?
The questions expose yet another divide, with Second Amendment activists and some security experts calling for safer school designs and some gun-control advocates saying it’s a distracting side issue that avoids more meaningful action.
The debate began after the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado and gained more attention in the aftermath of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
On Friday, in the hours after a student shot and killed 10 people at a high school in Santa Fe, Texas, the state’s lieutenant governor suggested again that it was time to examine school layouts.
“There are too many entrances and too many exits to our over 8,000 campuses in Texas,” Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said, explaining that those points can’t all be guarded.
Gun-rights activists, led by the National Rifle Association, have pushed for a “hardening” of schools, including training and arming educators and even keeping shrubbery and landscaping farther away from school buildings so there are fewer blocked viewpoints.
Reducing the number of entrances is considered another way to prevent gunmen from getting inside undetected.
According to a report last year in Education Week, a trade publication, the average age of an American school is 44 years with major renovations dating back more than a decade. Older buildings were designed without today’s worries of active shooters and terrorism.
They have lots of “nooks and crannies,” isolated areas that are difficult to supervise, as well as old hardware on classroom doors and main offices that aren’t located near the main entrance.
Other problems include old public-address systems and no telephones in classrooms.
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