Northern Illinois shooting calls attention to new era

Posted by Lizzie on Feb 18, 2008 - 11:59 pm

Three days ago a gunman opened fire in a lecture hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University, killing five students and himself. The University was able to respond using its emergency preparedness plan similar to the one being worked on here. But I am not writing this about how Northern Illinois reacted, because they achieved lockdown status within seven minutes, which for a campus of over 25,000 students is pretty darn good.

The reason I am bring you all this post is because while I peruse the news on a somewhat consistent basis, many of you don’t. When I asked a group of my friends about this today, only two of them knew about it. We have got to start paying attention to the news so that we can learn from these tragedies and avoid their occurrence. I can not even wrap my mind around what it would be like to a part of such a horrendous situation as this one or the one at Virginia Tech.

I am not your mom and I don’t like being told what to do either, but please, be safe, take care of your friends and be aware of what is around you.