Connecticut reacted swiftly in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to start working on ways to prevent future tragedies.
One of the key elements was having a commission establish standards for how schools are built, designed and renovated in order to be safe from a possible intruder.
Those recommendations were in addition to some of the strictest gun ownership and purchasing laws in the country, which included banning certain weapons.
The standards, adopted in 2014, established that schools needed to limit how people could enter the school and provided specific instructions for the construction of vestibules that needed to be closed to the public.
The standards also created guidelines for the use of closed-circuit surveillance cameras on school grounds.
Gov. Dannel Malloy said on Friday that those laws have kept students, staff and faculty safe since the Sandy Hook shooting, and implored other states to adopt similar standards.
"There are some states that have followed our lead, and there are other states that refuse to make their citizens safer," Malloy said.
Local
Some towns, like East Haven, are considering having police remain on patrol on school grounds for the foreseeable future, something Malloy said is something that should be decided by individual communities.
"We don’t run people’s decision making in that regard. I think that has been left to local governments," Malloy said.
