Steven Kazmierczak never went to Binghamton University.
Thank God.
Last week’s horrific quintuple-murder-suicide at Northern Illinois University raised concerns once again about security — or, more accurately, the vulnerability — of college campuses nationwide, including at BU and Broome Community College.
BCC President Laurence Spraggs announced earlier this week that his college will begin arming its peace officers with .40-caliber Glocks. BU’s on-campus officers already carry firearms.
But as almost any college-age kid will tell you, giving security guards all the firepower east of the Mississippi wouldn’t have stopped this unthinkable disaster. Short of installing metal detectors, most campus classrooms will be forever prone to a frenzied shooting.
No college student will forget where he was when he heard of last week’s NIU killings. And no college student will forget where he was when news of last spring’s Virginia Tech tragedy broke.
Events such as these, as horrible as they are, bring all campuses closer together. It’s unfortunate that it comes at the cost of pulling one campus irreparably apart.
College kids these days grew up immersed in tragedy. Way back, before the start of my journey into journalism, one of the most vivid television memories I have is of Columbine High School — on April 20, 1999, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold drove to school dressed in trenchcoats, and murdered 12 students and a teacher before taking their own lives.
Just two years later, the events of Sept. 11 played out during a typical high school morning — while we anxiously waited for second period to end.
And then last spring, as the Virginia Tech massacre unfolded, Binghamton University waited out a campus-wide blackout. Students — most unaware of the morning’s events — stayed in their dorms, playing board games in the dark until mid-afternoon. When our TV and Internet service flickered back on, 24-hour news channels introduced us to Seung-Hui Cho.
It’s difficult, as a young person, to attempt to comprehend the logic behind each event. Having seen each of these events unfold as an adolescent, I can only begin to rationalize how horrible each incident was.
At BU, for the most part, the campus community has been fortunate. The accidental on-campus death of Anders Uwadinobi in December was a stark reminder of our own mortality, but Binghamton has avoided the devastating massacres that have struck NIU and Virginia Tech.
As strong and connected as the BU campus is, however, the sad reality is that these tragedies take only one lost soul, one person disconnected from society to cause such pain.
Recent interviews with Kazmierczak’s girlfriend and colleagues have revealed a mixed history about the NIU gunman. It appears he was not the social outcast that Seung-Hui Cho was in school — and that’s a scary notion for the thousands of BU students who share lecture halls every day with quiet, unassuming classmates.
But despite the recent attention given to the inherent vulnerability of our campuses, I wouldn’t be overly concerned about the near future of local schools such as Binghamton University.
Instead, I’m troubled by the notion that especially malleable elementary-age schoolchildren are growing up in a world where these tragedies are part of the norm. In my community, as junior high schoolers, Columbine certainly made an impression — but by that point in life, we understood the black-and-white difference between wrong and right.
For the next generation of college students, whose societal upbringings prominently include these horrific shootings, I can only hope that their parents are talking openly with them, and teaching them those same moral premises that have, to this point, kept these shootings relatively sporadic.
Strub is a copy editor at the Press & Sun-Bulletin.
cstrub@pressconnects.com
No comments:
Post a Comment