Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said schools should train employees in defense skills to help thwart mass shooting attempts.
Paxton spoke a day after an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
"Look, we just spent 40 billion on Ukraine to help protect another nation," Paxton told Fox News on Wednesday. "It seems like the least we could do is fund a police officer or at least a program … because obviously there are thousands and thousands of schools in this country … a program that trains people in the school so that when this does happen, because it will happen again, we know what's going to happen.
"So, if we know it's going to happen, let's do everything we can to prevent it from turning into the situation we just had yesterday [Tuesday]."
Paxton, who held off a GOP primary challenge on Tuesday night, told Fox News that when he served in the Texas legislature, the body funded a program that allowed local school districts to decide if they wanted to teach teachers and other people in the school how to defend themselves.
"I think that program is essential because law enforcement cannot react quick enough to stop these things every time," Paxton told Fox News.
"We're going to need people on the ground, whether they're trained police officers or whether they are people that are trained in the school so that the reaction time is much more quickly."
Asked about critics who don't want school guards and teachers armed, Paxton said: "The politics shouldn't matter. What should matter is what's going to work, what's going to protect 19 children and two teachers from being dead within minutes of a gunman walking in the school."
Paxton admitted that trying to prevent mass shootings is challenging.
"I think we need to find ways to limit access so there's not multiple points of entry, but if people have got a gun, they're going to get through one point of access," he said. "You've got to have either a police officer there or other people trained to react in moments of crisis like this.
"We are not going to prevent bad people from existing and from going crazy and walking into schools to do this. They know that they can be successful, because almost everybody that tries, it seems like they have an opportunity to be successful."
Paxton, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, defeated George P. Bush, nephew of the former President George W. Bush and son of former Florida GOP Gov. Jeb Bush, in Tuesday's attorney general primary race.
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