Opinion: Door lock lessons are needed

I thought I had a pretty fair understanding of how door locks worked until I read the reports involving the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

According to news reports, the shooter entered the school through a door with a lock that could only be locked from the outside, and then got into a classroom through a door that had a “busted lock.”

The busted lock is really immaterial, since the classroom door also had a lock that could not be locked from the inside.

An article by Heather Hollingsworth, in The Associated Press, reported that Ken Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services, stated that when doors are not secure, “your first step, your first line of defense has been taken away from you really.”

According to the same article, Col. Steve McCraw, Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, in discussing the outside door, stated that a teacher had closed the door, but unbeknownst to her, it could be locked only from the outside. At this point, the executive director of the National School Safety Center, Ronald Stephens, expressed astonishment.

Stephens inquired, “Shouldn’t the security of the school be as safe as the security of your home?”

Further, “To only be able to lock from the outside is just totally unacceptable in my view.”

I’ll come back to what the “experts” determined about this lock shortly.

The shooter then entered a classroom through a door that had a lock that could not be locked from the inside, by design. It is against the law to place children in a room that has no way out in case of fire.

It should be evident that if you have a schoolroom full of children with a lock that they can’t lock, the door is unlocked. Police waited for a key, by a door that was unlocked, and indeed, according to the article mentioned above, McCraw disclosed that despite the fact that the door was unlocked, there is no indication officers tried to open it during the standoff.

As promised above, let’s talk about the outside door.

Even after Ronald Stephens expressed astonishment at the design of the door lock, the AP article states, “Experts did not explain during the hearing why the school’s exterior door locked from the outside. Robb Elementary is an older building, constructed in 1955.”

That’s what experts do. They hold hearings.

It was the lock’s fault, or a maintenance problem, or old construction. It certainly wasn’t the shooter’s fault, or the officers who couldn’t find a key.

Rube Render is a former Clovis city commissioner and former chair of the Curry County Republican Party. Contact him:

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