Northern Illinois University experienced a tragedy Feb. 14. A gunman shot 21 people, killing five, before shooting himself. Like many other mass shootings that have occurred at an alarmingly increased rate, we are left to mourn the loss of lives and innocence without the answer to an eternally asked question — why?
Why has this type of an incident happened again, and why does it feel strangely different this time?
Everyone remembers the inability to escape from the ever-flowing fountain of information that the media brought to us regarding Virginia Tech. It was just a year ago that we were shocked as a community by the shooting at Trolley Square.
Virginia Tech and Trolley Square will be embedded in our recollection of history forever, but it feels as though the increasing regularity of these events has made us jaded to the point that the shooting at NIU was but a hiccup on the Richter scale.
An abundance of nationwide vigils were held in remembrance of victims of previous shootings. Even here at the U, we responded to Virginia Tech with a vigil — attended by a number of local media outlets — where light piano music played while students wearing memorial ribbons could walk around and view pictures of the departed. Later, we established a security task force to determine if we could make our students safer from violence on campus.
Where is the vigil now? Across the country, more students have died at the hands of one of their peers, but there is no piano, no pictures and no new word from the task force.
Are we that desensitized to events like these that five deaths are but a blip on the scale of what we are willing to mourn and pay tribute to? Or do we, perhaps, just want to ignore what has happened because to deal with another loss is too big a burden to handle?
The fact of the matter is that we are all peers. When one campus experiences a loss, no matter how great or small, we have all experienced a loss — a loss that reminds us that our campus might not be safe and what we take from our time in school might cross the bounds of education and entertainment into the realities of great loss and injustice.
From one group of students to another, we at The Daily Utah Chronicle would like to say that we regret the pain and great losses those at NIU have had to experience. We mourn your tragedy as though it were our own, and we stand by your side in spirit.