On the heels of more than 760 marches nationwide demanding gun control, Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress offered his own solution to stop school massacres like the one that killed 17 people in Florida last month.

The head of megachurch First Baptist Dallas assured his Sunday audience on Fox News that there's nothing wrong with the marches, though he noted that legislation alone won't change anything.

So he proposed turning back the clock several decades.

The solution — or the first step, as he sees it — is for children to memorize the Ten Commandments in school.

"I think we need to return to that," Jeffress said. "Teaching people, starting with our children, that there is a God to whom they're accountable is not the only thing we need to do to end gun violence, but it is the first thing we need to do."

.@robertjeffress: "@POTUS is the most faith-friendly president we've ever had, and that includes Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush." pic.twitter.com/EQqMt1KACu — Fox News (@FoxNews) March 25, 2018

In the Fox & Friends segment, the pastor railed against "a crusade by secularists" to keep religion off the public square in what he said was an effort to convince others that people can be good without God.

"Well, that's been a dismal failure," Jeffress said. "I remind our viewers that for the first 150 years of our nation's history, our schoolchildren prayed, they read Scripture in school, they even memorized the Ten Commandments, including the commandment 'Thou shall not kill.'"

Then he went on to blame a ruling by the Supreme Court 60 years ago.

It is not unconstitutional for students to read the Bible in school or to pray openly, but over the years, the Supreme Court has barred schools from imposing religious expression on children. The justices have pointed to the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from a) favoring a particular faith, and b) denying people the right to practice any religion, or to not practice at all.

Jeffress didn't specify what Supreme Court decision he was referencing. He may have been citing a 1963 landmark case, Abington School District vs. Schempp, in which the high court ruled 8-1 that it was unconstitutional for a Pennsylvania school district to require students to read Bible verses and recite the Lord's prayer.

Writing for the majority was Justice Tom C. Clark, a former Dallas County civil district attorney.

"While the Free Exercise Clause clearly prohibits the use of state action to deny the rights of free exercise to anyone, it has never meant that a majority could use the machinery of the State to practice its beliefs," he wrote.

The Supreme Court took up the question of the propriety of displaying the Ten Commandments in school in 1980, with a case out of Kentucky. Parents had complained about a state law that required the posting of the Ten Commandments in each public school classroom. The court ruled 5-4 against the practice.

"Posting of religious texts on the wall serves no such educational function," reads the majority opinion. "If the posted copies of the Ten Commandments are to have any effect at all, it will be to induce the schoolchildren to read, meditate upon, perhaps to venerate and obey, the Commandments. However desirable this might be as a matter of private devotion, it is not a permissible state objective under the Establishment Clause."

The terrible distinction of deadliest school massacre in the U.S. remains with the Bath School bombing in 1927 that killed 44 people — including 38 schoolchildren — in Michigan. The perpetrator was a disgruntled school board member who also died in the explosion.

While schools may feel less safe now as more cities and towns become linked to tragedies, campus shootings are extremely rare and account for only a small fraction of the gun-violence epidemic in the U.S., according to The Washington Post.

But those incidents have touched the lives of thousands of children and young adults. The Post reported this month that more than 187,000 students have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.

The March for Our Lives protests called for gun control laws such as age limits on purchases, bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and better background checks.

CORRECTION, 12:53 a.m. March 27, 2018: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the Florida high school mass shooting killed 17 students. It killed 14 students and three staff members.