Editorial
Reflecting on the shelter-in-place
By Editorial Staff
October 23, 2015
Some students have called the shelter-in-place ‘ridiculous.’ Indeed, the basic narrative is almost comic: a student with a Nerf gun participating in an annual event gets reported as a possible shooter, shutting down the College and several schools around the country that received the emergency notification.
A local news report on one of those incidental school shutdowns tells us something revealing about that day. In an update to their article, they corrected, “An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the active shooter robocall originated in Texas. It actually originated from Hamilton College in New York.”
Think about that. There was confusion about which college shooter emergency caused the school to shut down. Two actual college shootings in Texas and Arizona occurred on the same day as Hamilton’s shelter-in-place.
Hypervigilance is a necessary product of this environment. Between this, Wednesday’s drill and the shelter-in-place last spring, Hamilton has shown its preparedness for events of this kind. We applaud the work that the College has done.
Still, what we really learned that day was that this is the world we live in. While some participants of Humans vs. Zombies expressed their disappointment that the game was shut down, the reality is that the fun and games were already over. There have been four other shootings at schools in the last year, including one in Oregon just a week before Oct. 9.
While we should appreciate the efforts Hamilton has clearly made to prepare for emergencies like these, this is also a time to reflect on how real these threats have become. Even in rural Central New York, a Nerf gun can bring everything to a halt.