I stopped in to the bike store yesterday to buy a new seat, and upon my asking about whether all seats fit all seat posts, the bike store guy replied, well if it doesn't work out for you, bring it back. Then his eyes shot up from the register: but if you scuff it, it's yours.
No problem, I said. Okay, he said. Then he handed me my change and with wild eyes and no prompting from me began to outline his plan to shield the U of I from a Va Tech-like tragedy. It involved a five-siren alarm system, with each sound indicating something different. Terrorists, firearms, gangs, he listed. I zipped up my backpack and told him about our department's emergency calling tree--something I've found irrationally comforting of late--but he waved me off: they do it for tornadoes and fires. Why not for other danger.
He has a point, I guess. Campuses are so spread out, like cities. Email is probably not the answer--too silent, too ignorable; email comes from old people, E's students at RIT tell her. What happens when a killer is loose in a city? Emergency broadcasts, those painfully-pitched, unchanged-from-the seventies beeps that would cut into so many radio songs. For campuses, figuring out a way to pipe an emergency bulletin through ipods and cell phones might be a good start. Someone should get on that. (Yes I know it might not be possible. This is my point.)
The thing is, my gun control rant notwithstanding, I have a hard time imagining how something like this could have been--or could be--prevented. The U of I chancellor's message about the event, urging cautious awareness, pretty much captures how difficult it is to anticipate and respond to snap-occurrences. In this case so many snaps happened--in Cho's faculties, in the chain padlock, in the glock magazine. They snapped.
But what is the bike shop guy to do besides think and plan? Campus officials and teachers and mental health workers and politicians should all think and plan as those freakishly-staged images Cho made of himself and his bullets loop on tv and the internet, the stuff of a crapass, unimaginative horror flick. And we'll work through, maybe try to change things that--here's a useful southernism--might could make a difference, no one can know.
