One year ago, we sat dumbfounded, staring at television sets with blank expressions of utter disbelief and disgust. How could it happen again?
That morning, in Blacksburg, Va., a 23-year-old by the name of Seung-Hui Cho fired upon dozens of students and staff in the heart of Virginia Tech's campus.
Just as Cho wished, we couldn't look away from the coverage. We needed to watch — or to confirm — that another surreal incident had put our peers in peril. We needed to be reminded of the worst that humanity has to offer, if just to be re-energized to fight against it. We needed to feel the pain of the Virginia Tech community because another young man, deemed a lost cause, had put his vindictive frustrations into action.
We hoped the number of estimated victims at the bottom of the screen would stop climbing and we let out deep signs of anguish when it, in fact, did.
Cho took 32 innocent lives with him that day.
One year later, it remains the single worst school shooting in U.S. history.
Today, we must remember — we must remember the victims, we must remember the heroes who prevented Cho from taking more lives and, of course, we must remember the lessons learned.
Yet that doesn't seem to be in the plans — no ASU vigils are planned just one year after Virginia Tech.
Though this would've been a nice way for the ASU community to pay our respects, there're other ways to do it, namely by ensuring that these 32 lives weren't lost in vain — that we've seen in their ultimate loss the need to ensure student safety. But this has been only partially realized.
An ASU panel has spent the last year reviewing and suggesting new security measures on our campuses. It recently came out with its preliminary findings, including creating an emergency manager position, changing door-locking systems and building a database for student behavioral issues.
Though these are grand ideas, in the year since Virginia Tech, few safety measures have actually been enacted, and the need for more preventive steps has been largely ignored.
The first measure put into place — the text-message alert system — was not implemented during any three of the bomb threats this semester and was ineffective during Nov. 1's Memorial Union fire. The other measure, the addition of assault-style weapons to the campus-police arsenal, should prove beneficial, but even so, its effectiveness is still (thankfully) unproven.
Pre-emptive tactics necessary to halt a Virginia Tech-like shooting are lacking. Have improvements been made to our policies for identifying and helping at-risk students after seeing how Virginia Tech's system broke down? Have we upgraded our counseling services? Are we more prepared personnel-wise to respond to a campus-wide crisis?
A year later, we're left wondering why the process of beefing up campus security hasn't been accelerated. We know it takes time to properly research and enact certain findings, but one year is enough time.
