The police sirens seemed to be streaming through the windows at a normal rate at first. I sat there on the floor of my apartment, folding laundry and not thinking much of the fact that something in town had gone wrong. My awareness of the situation started slow, but eventually I started to realize that the sirens were loud. Close. They were not a distant problem but an immediate one. My suspicions were confirmed by the sound of my roommates beginning to get very excited in the living room. I joined them at the window that overlooked the lawn of our apartment complex. Cop cars were everywhere, and a team of about seven or eight police officers was approaching one of my neighboring buildings. Their movements were methodical; guns were drawn.
I made brief eye contact with my roommate, eyebrows raised. We threw around a couple of speculations but ultimately had no idea what was happening to our quiet, little home. The police went into the building. We listened to the officers barking out orders and updates. A girl was hastily escorted to safety. They brought in a dog who barked his way through the whole building. They moved on to another building, beginning to evacuate my fellow students. One helicopter appeared over the apartment, followed quickly by a second and a third. Reality began to sink in. This was not a little burglary or a small-time drug bust-- this was big.
We scoured the news on our phones, searching for information and bemoaning our lack of cable TV. Finally, we found an updated news source with a headline containing these two words: ACTIVE SHOOTER. Stunned, we continued to watch the drama unfold.
I studied the attitude of the officers. They were tense and disciplined at first in the way that they were approaching the buildings. There was a protocol here. As time went on, I watched the tension leave the situation. The police were clearing the buildings and beginning to relax. By the time they reached my building, they were no longer evacuating people, simply checking in. They asked us if we had heard anything and gave us the assurance that the situation was under control and under investigation.
It was over, and my roommates and I were left with the sound of chopper blades and the task of responding to many nervous text messages. My one roommate spent some time trying to screenshot an aerial shot from the news because it showed a cop taking cover behind his car. “I made the big time!” he said. “My car is famous!”
About an hour later, the news came that the alleged gunshots were simply bubble wrap followed by an individual crying that they had been shot.
So, let’s start with the obvious fact: this is funny. The fact that we had a lockdown situation complete with cops, choppers, and attack dogs because of a roll of bubble wrap is honestly hilarious. The jokes that come to mind are nearly limitless. “Little Johnny was such a good kid, but yesterday I saw him on the street with a sheet of bubble wrap.” “Excuse me, ma’am, do you have a license for that roll?” “I defend my constitutional right to bear bubbles.”
Okay, now that that’s covered, I want to talk about a couple of things in this story that are not funny. First of all, the individual who called the cops because of the bubble wrap is receiving considerable ridicule from people on social media and in the general public. While this situation as a whole is ridiculous to the extreme, the caller did absolutely nothing wrong. They were responding to an indistinct bang followed by a cry warning about shots being fired. If they had not called in an emergency, they would have been acting with austere irresponsibility. Say what you will about the false alarm that the call caused, I prefer a false alarm to ignoring a real shooting situation.
The other part of this that is not funny at all is the climate that we live in that allows the threat of a shooting to be so possible. We have heard the stories, more and more as the time goes on, of the tragic shootings that sweep so many innocent lives away. This situation that we had in my apartment complex was a hypothetical tragedy. It never came fully about, but for a moment, all of us had a chance to experience a tiny portion of the emotion that people who fall victim to actual shootings have to face. This is a real problem. We live in a world where people are indiscriminately gunned down. I was blessed by the fact that my situation was a false alarm. I was also blessed by the fact that the police response was so incredibly swift and affective. My heart breaks for the reality that so many times, things did not work out so well for others.
