it's 8:15 in the evening, five hours before I'm writing these words this afternoon a sick person walked into a Northern Illinois University lecture hall with a pistol and a shotgun and opened fire on an auditorium full of students. and as of right now i know five students are dead, 16 are wounded, and the bastard with the guns killed himself.
working at the chicago tribune for 10 years i've become a little desensitized to senseless violence stories. sure, some stick out more than others now and then, like virginia tech a year ago which was a lot worse than what happened today but no less tragic. but this one i can't let go. i'm coming up on 34 years old, and to this day i still hold the four and a half years in DeKalb as some of the best years of my life. and to think there are kids there tonight whose lives have been forever changed (hell, some ENDED) because of what happened today... and those kids won't be able to look back and say the same thing about their college years because of this... it's making me ill.
the shooting happened in Cole Hall, as close to the center of campus as you can get really. i had several Gen Ed classes there. math and science lectures mostly. some at 8 am, some at 6pm, i'm sure a few at the exact same time as the shootings happened today. there was one astronomy class i remember taking where the professor (dammit i can't remember his name) used to play one song from a pink floyd concert video (delicate sound of thunder) before every lecture. there was a disappointing mythology class at 8am that i probably fell asleep for at least 15 minutes each class. professor waterman's goofy accent during math 210 lectures (amazing how some things stick in your memory and some things don't).
ever since i heard about the shooting today i've been thinking about sitting in that lecture hall, and trying to imagine what it would be like to see what those kids saw there today. as hard as i try, i'm sure what i imagine in my head doesn't come close to what actually happened.
i don't know what else to say... my thoughts go out to everyone affected out there. pick yourselves up, huskies.
(side note... almost as disturbing as the sick event itself is reading comments on message boards about the story where a number of people/comments say that if students were able to arm themselves that this wouldn't have happened. i can't believe these 2nd ammendment huggers actually use this tragedy to try and support their cause. 20 people were shot in a matter of seconds, and they think some kid packing a gun in his backpack would have helped prevent this? give me a break).