On Friday, October 2, an anonymous blogger posted a threat of violence against a University near Philadelphia for Monday, October 5 at 2 p.m. The threat was posted on 4Chan, a website that allows members to post anonymously, one day after the shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon on October 1, which killed nine. The post called this violence the Beta Revolution, and encouraged others to take up arms against an institution of higher education. I attend the University of Pennsylvania, which is in Philadelphia, and so many of my friends elected to stay home from school that day. The University did not shut down operations, but did increase police presence.
The FBI issued a warning to Philadelphia-area Universities over the weekend, but claimed that the threat was not serious. Many Penn students didn’t care. In my 100-person lecture on Monday afternoon at 1 p.m., about 15 people came. My professor decided to spend our 50-minute class time talking about gun violence and why so many students were too afraid to come to class. In the middle of class my phone lit up; my friends notified me of a video showing a student loading a rifle in his dormitory. I got texts like, “Come home now,” and “Don’t walk on campus!” As the clock crept closer and closer to 1:50 p.m., many of us began to pack up our backpacks.
I was hesitant about going to class from the get-go. My parents encouraged me to continue my day like I would any other day, and so did my Modern Political Thought professor, who brought a Keep Calm and Carry On poster to class to illustrate her argument against letting an anonymous, online gun-hugger deter us from living our lives. However, at about 1:35 p.m. I began packing up my backpack, praying she would let us out.
I live in the most nationally secure, militarily dominant country in the world, and I felt very, very afraid that I would be shot by a person with a gun, in my classroom, where we were supposed to be discussing Nietzsche. This baffles me. When young people are too afraid to go to class because of the accessibility of arms and the growing prevalence of gun violence in this country, there is a national security threat more serious than any outside our borders.
President Obama challenged the media to compare gun violence to terrorism. Obama said, “We spend over a trillion dollars, and pass countless laws, and devote entire agencies to preventing terrorist attacks on our soil, and rightfully so. And yet, we have a Congress that explicitly blocks us from even collecting data on how we could potentially reduce gun deaths. How can that be?” Vox published 17 charts in answer to his challenge.
The Vox results are invaluable; here are some important takeaways:
- The United States comprises 4.4% of the world population, and 50% of the civilian-owned guns in the entire world.
- States with more guns have more gun deaths (couldn’t a Kindergartner figure this out?)
- States with tighter gun laws have fewer gun deaths.
CNN also published an important graph illustrating that from 2001-2013, 3,380 people died by terrorism, while 406,496 died by firearm. These statistics press the question: why aren’t we treating guns with the same fear and severity as we treat terrorism?
