Understandably, the tragedy at Virginia Tech has prompted more letters to the editor for The State Press than anything else all year.
Many of them have brought up the issue of campus safety, wondering what ASU has been doing, or proposing their own ways of keeping us safe in the case of a shooter opening fire on our campus.
While we completely empathize with the desire to feel safe as we go to class or walk from our cars to the library on a dark night, we can't help feeling that the search for safety has gone too far.
Much has been made of the relatively slow response to the shooting incident by the Virginia Tech administration. These attacks are insensitive for a number of reasons. Primarily, many of them ignore the simple logistical and technical obstacles to sending out an e-mail to tens of thousands of students. It takes awhile to process that much information.
Furthermore, the larger, unaddressed issue, is the fact that an e-mail would only help that portion of the student body who happens to be at their computers, or Blackberry-equipped.
Other preventive measures suggested include a campus-wide loudspeaker system and allowing professors to lock their doors - both of which make a whole lot more sense.
However, after a certain point, we have to accept the fact that we can never be truly and completely safe.
This isn't to say we shouldn't hold administration officials accountable for not making campus as safe as possible. There are certainly minimum, practical concerns that need to be addressed, and we do our best to report on those, such as when one residence hall's keyless entry system was broken.
Ultimately, though, a person who is truly determined to commit horrific, unthinkable acts of violence will always be able to find a way, even if we had a police officer in every classroom.
Many letters and pundits have made the argument that if gun owners were allowed to bring their weapons anywhere, one of them may have stopped the killing much sooner.
While this may have happened, more guns wouldn't make us safer. There isn't much that will. And it's time we accepted it - and stop trying to find a convenient place to lay the blame for Virginia Tech.
