The catastrophic shooting Thursday at Northern Illinois University, where a gunman opened fire on 21 individuals before taking his own life, serves as a terrifying reminder that incidents like the one that transpired at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 are not as few and far between as we would hope. This event brings the issue of campus safety crashing into everyone’s consciousness and we are led to wonder: how would NCSU handle a situation like this?
Immediately after the shootings occurred, students on the NIU campus were notified via emergency text-messaging services, reverse 9-1-1 callbacks and bulletins on the campus Web site. Although our University has various emergency broadcast systems in the works, we don’t yet have nearly as efficient a program in place to respond to such a circumstance.
We are forced to wonder why, so long after the tragic events at Virginia Tech, our school is still so seemingly ill-prepared to notify students in the event of an emergency. The Technician has reported on the administration’s efforts to create a response system for more than six months now and has repeatedly called for acceleration on the implementation of this system. The longer we wait, the longer students remain at risk.
Officials recently announced the WolfAlert emergency text-messageing system will be tested during the week of Feb. 18. Although it is reassuring to know great pains are being taken to ensure the efficiency of our emergency system, this process needs to be expedited so it is in place when it can. NIU may be a smaller university than ours, but it still doesn’t make sense that they could have a fully operational text-messaging system before we have even tested our service.
We need to take yesterday’s events at NIU as a wake up call for our University. Threats to our student body are real and we need to be prepared to deal with the worst case scenario now rather than later. Administrators need to cut through the red tape and implement the plans that are in the works. We don’t ever want to be in this situation, but if we are, we don’t want to look back regretting what we could have done.