My mom called me this evening to see if I had seen the news about the shootings at Northern Illinois University. I had heard it on the way home. She wanted me to reassure her that I was safe. You see, I work at a University myself and with all the school and college shootings lately she has become concerned. Well, I think she has a right to be. 32 at Virginia Tech, 2 in Louisiana last week, now 16 in Illinois, I wonder about safety myself. But as I told my mom there is not a lot we can do, it would be virtually impossible to secure every building on every campus from this type of attack. Its so damn random.
I work with college students everyday and I know how unstable they are, hell its the most traumatic time of their life for the most of them and they are not equipped to handle it. If I had a dollar for every college student that's cried in my office I'd be a bit closer to retirement. You never know what to expect from them from one day to the next.
One of my jobs is being the admin of our emergency text message system. The software that we put in place after Va.Tech so that if there is a shooter on campus we can send a text message out to anyone subscribed and tell them what to do. Its scary to have to think about this kind of thing on a regular basis, and not only think about it but plan for it. And most of all to know no matter how much you plan or how what systems you put in place that if something like this occurs, its never going to be enough.
My heart goes out to those at NIU.
School Shootings By State (data from Wikipedia)
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