This past week at Villanova University an individual reported they heard shots. This led to Villanova Public safety announcing there was an active shooter on campus and that everyone needed to take immediate shelter. At the time I served as the manager of the Connelly Center, our student center here on campus. When the notification came in, my fellow managers ran into the office in total chaos not knowing what to do. I sprang into action completely forgetting I was barefoot. We shuffled to find the keys and announce the building was going into lockdown. The three of us never received any formal training on what to do with a shooter on campus, but we had the building locked within two minutes. Everyone was filed into different rooms on campus with the hopes of keeping everyone safe.
I had to update the different rooms every time we got a new update. In the mad chaos of everyone shuffling from eating their dinners or studying I climbed up onto a higher surface to alert the mad crowds of people. What happened next is something I will never forget. As I got the shuffling to quiet, I announced, "Hi everyone my name is Tori and I am the manager in this building. There is an active shooter on campus and the doors are being locked as we speak please stay here and remain calm."
I crawled between windows carrying steel bars to barricade our doors as soon as possible. The other managers contacted our supervisors and assisted upstairs. The alert turned out to be unfounded, but it does not diminish the reaction we had at the time.
The fact that college aged students without any formal training were able to react to a shooting threat shows how common we are to the system. Our parents were raised with duck and cover drills now we are raised with shooter or bomb drills. We are exposed to it every day on the news. We are shown the faces of shooting victims and told the stories of how the ones survived.
Society today has become numb to the fact that school shootings because of their commonality. The way that one reacts to school shootings is so sad, but no one wants to do anything about it. The entire system is broken so much so that people use an amendment meant to be used to allow states to fight a tyrannical government is the justification for everyone to have the right to firearms. There are serious situations, but people are too afraid to change, people are too afraid to accept the use of a gun has changed.
A gun today can end dozens of lives in seconds. A gun can kill the next Nobel prize, the doctor who will cure cancer, the next environmentalist, it can kill anyone anytime.
People argue a gun does not kill people, but if the person does not have a gun can they cause the same levels of destruction? The gun enables people to kill instantaneously and in larger masses than ever before.
Villanova was lucky that it was just a false alarm, but that may not always be the case. We need to make sure that the world changes so every kid gets to see their own graduation.
