Virgina Tech, one year later

Virginia Tech students, faculty and staff, as well as members of the Blacksburg, Va.,… Virginia Tech students, faculty and staff, as well as members of the Blacksburg, Va., community paid tribute yesterday to the one-year anniversary of the tragic shootings that took the lives of 32 people, as well as gunman Seung-Hui Cho.

It’s hard to believe it has been a year since Cho’s massacre, which shook Virginia Tech’s campus to its core and caused members of college communities across the nation to wonder who would be next.

Unfortunately, this question would be answered in less than a year, when a lone gunman opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in February.

In the year since Virginia Tech, colleges across the county have done their best to learn from the shootings, implementing emergency alert systems and engaging students, faculty and staff members in discussions on the best precautions to take in order to prevent future incidents of violence.

We applaud the universities across the country – including Pitt – that have taken it upon themselves to learn from the Virginia Tech tragedy and encourage them to continue to do more to streamline emergency alert systems in order to get the word out to students as quickly as possible.

Part of the burden of responding efficiently to threats of campus violence must also fall upon students, though. Campus police responded quickly and efficiently to the bomb threats at the Cathedral of Learning, Hillman Library and Posvar Hall last week. But as they did, students stood close the buildings, casually talking to friends and waiting to hear whether their classes were canceled.

The occurrence of a shooting or bomb on campus seems so unlikely that it’s easy for us to disregard our emergency alert text messages and phone calls as false alarms. We never imagine that tragedies like Virginia Tech and NIU could happen at Pitt, but the reality is – they can. It’s crucial that we do not find ourselves desensitized to threats of violence on campus, because it is at the moment when we find ourselves infallible that we are the most susceptible.

The American belief system has also been challenged in the year since Virginia Tech. The unnerving ease at which Cho legally purchased the firearms he would later use in the shootings set off a nationwide debate over gun rights in the United States. Some people argue the best way to prevent future campus shootings is to further regulate gun rights, others believe gun rights should be extended to allow students to carry weapons on campus in order to respond to incidents of threat or violence.

We might not reconcile the answer to these challenging questions any time soon, but it is important that we continue to have these discussions, keeping the reality and severity of campus violence in our minds and the memory of those who tragically lost their lives at Virginia Tech and NIU in our hearts at all times.