In the last 52 years, 1,081 Americans were killed in 151 mass shootings across the

country. Twenty-five of these lives were lost in 2018 alone. Four at Ed’s Car Wash in January.

Seventeen at Marjory Stoneman Douglass High School in February. Four at a Waffle House in

April.

Following the Stoneman Douglass shooting in Parkland, Fla., students across the U.S.

seized an opportunity to stand up and fight for new legislation to protect themselves. They

called for a ban on assault weapons, bump stocks, and pushed for more comprehensive

background checks to prevent these weapons from falling into the hands of potential shooters

aiming to afflict harm on others.

Emma Gonzalez, one of the survivors of the Stoneman Douglass attack, has been

incredibly vocal about her and her classmates’ desires for stronger gun control laws and has

pushed back against the second amendment, which she feels is antiquated and should be

reinterpreted. “Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second

Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The

guns have changed but our laws have not,” said Gonzalez in a speech she gave on February 17,

just three days after gunman Nikolas Cruz attacked her school.

On Wednesday, February 21, one week after the events at Parkland, the administration at

Lyons Township High School in LaGrange, Ill. began receiving phone calls and emails from

concerned students, claiming that they feared a particular student would bring a gun to the annual

all-school assembly where 4,000 students would be in the same room. “Obviously, the first step

is to get the police involved,” said Lyons Township High School principal Brian Waterman.

“They work with us to interview students, interview as many people as possible until you can get

down to the person that either made the threat or was reported to have made the threat.”
 Following the investigation and the administration’s determination that the threat was

simply a misinterpreted conversation and therefore not a cause for alarm, a group of 300 students

protested at Lyons Township’s North Campus to express their concerns for their safety, based on

rumors that had spread through social media the previous night. Students were sharing

confidential information on Facebook and Snapchat throughout the night and caused a panic that

reverberated through to the weekend. The administration made the decision to ultimately cancel

the assembly based on the emotional state of the students, staff and parents at that time.

“In terms of school safety, we always look at our emergency plans, we’re always

updating the technology we have available. We actually just completed a pretty comprehensive

review of our emergency plan a year ago,” Waterman said. “I think what happened in Florida

really has given schools an even greater opportunity to look very critically at the technologies we

have available.”

The problem hasn’t been confined to K-12 education in the past years, however. In

addition to Parkland, Sandy Hook and Columbine., there have been incidents on college

campuses, such as the shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Northern Illinois in 2008. These

have also heightened gun issues. . “We live in an age now where we have really sophisticated

weapons to hurt a lot of people all at once and I think that’s a really scary aspect of this whole

thing,” said University of Illinois Police spokesperson Patrick Wade. The University of Illinois

Police Department has a no-tolerance policy regarding threats and patterns of intimidation,

outlined in their Campus Violence Protection Plan.

“We train our officers in active threat response,” said Todd Short, lieutenant of

emergency planning for the University Police Department. If an active shooting was to occur on

campus, the Department has plans and tactics designed to stop the threat as quickly as possible,
including calling upon other local jurisdictions for assistance. “There’s not really a whole lot to

it, it’s just a matter of finding that person and stopping them as quickly as possible,” Wade said.

The University Police train with the other three major law enforcement departments in

the area—the Champaign Police, the Urbana Police, and the Champaign County Sheriff—to

ensure efficiency and rapid response. “They all train together and they do the same training, so

they can all respond to the scene. We can have a whole lot of officers on the scene really

quickly. No matter who shows up… they know how everyone is supposed to function in that

situation,” added Wade.

The “Run, Hide, Fight” plan is a standard procedure made available to students on the

University Police website as well as through voluntary classes taught by the Department to

communicate to students what to do in the event of a campus emergency. “Run” is the first

option, recommending people leave the area and get away from the danger as quickly as

possible. “Hide” is encouraged when students are unable to run, encouraging them to take

refuge in a place where they can be silent, unseen, and barricade themselves from any threat.

“Fight” is recommended only if the situation allows or it is required to survive.

According to Sergeant Aaron Landers, on average, it takes three minutes for law

enforcement to arrive on the scene of a shooting, making the “Run, Hide, Fight” plan the most

critical thing a student can know and employ in the event of a life-threatening situation.

While there has never been an active shooting on University of Illinois property, three

people have been killed in incidences of gun violence in Champaign-Urbana since 2016. “It’s

definitely a troubling trend, we’ve been seeing it more around here in the past decade or so

compared to decades before that. Shootings are something that are really concerning to us in this

area,” Wade said.

 According to Wade, it is not uncommon for a gun threat to be made against the

University, and these threats are dealt with by a threat assessment team and a behavioral

intervention team trained to determine the credibility of the threat and determine what steps

should be taken. “There may be mental health issues, maybe this person is just angry and they

want to hurt somebody, maybe they need to go to jail,” Wade said. “Depending on the situation

and the threat, that team will decide what needs to happen to keep people safe.”

The University Police Department encourages all students, staff, and educators to report

any suspicious activity or threats to them or to dial 911 in the event of an emergency.

Despite the statistics and the seemingly increasing occurrence of such events, the number

of shootings is on the decline, according to Grant Duwe, a leading criminologist who has been

studying mass shootings since 2007. According to his findings, only 26 mass shootings occurred

between 2000 and 2009, a far cry from the 43 shootings that faced the nation in the 90s. Duwe

believes that the same social factors that lead to a decrease in general crime rates also lead to

decreases in mass shootings, and society’s diligence and awareness of the issue has also led law

enforcement to catch more of the would-be offenders before they act.

When these shootings occur, some observers point their finger at the perpetrator and

immediately label the suspect mentally ill. After the Parkland shooting, Speaker of the House

Paul Ryan said, “Mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies.” In a report

from the New York Times, it was found that roughly only 22 percent of people who commit mass

shootings struggle with or could be considered to have a mental illness. Its report did, however,

also find that this number is disproportionately large when compared to non-mass shooting

related gun violence; roughly one percent of isolated gun incidents are due to preexisting mental

health issues.
 “I think [mental health] plays the biggest role,” Waterman said. “We’re going to do all

these physical things to increase security, but really our best defense is the relationships we have

with students… we rely on students, when they hear something concerning, see something that’s

concerning to them, them telling us is still our greatest defense against school violence… the

social and emotional learning part of this is critical.”

On a global scale, contrasts between the U.S. and other westernized nations exist. A

BBC report found that in 2016, 64 percent of homicides in the U.S. were gun related, versus just

four and a half percent in the U.K. Gun control laws in the U.K. prohibit ownership of handguns

for their ease of concealment, prohibit shotguns with a capacity higher than three bullets, and

semi-automatic weaponry is only allowed if the bullet size is 5.6mm or smaller. Gun owners

must also register their weapons with their local police every five years, citing justification for

why the gunowner wants to possess that gun, and these licenses can be denied if the authorities

determine the applicant to be a threat.

In the U.S., this type of licensing and background checking is not a required step in gun

ownership. While there is a system in place to conduct background checks, only federally

licensed gun sellers are required to submit information to the FBI, leaving room for unlicensed

sellers and private individuals to conduct business without background checks.

The topic of gun legislation is a polarizing one among American citizens, with many

people having different views on the best way to approach the problem. Some people, like

University of Illinois student Nik Pfanner, would like to see universal background checks in the

U.S. like those in the U.K. Noah Legenski, also a University student, feels similarly. “I think,

sadly, legislation needs to be brought up to the national level,” Legenski said. “State’s rights are
good, in many cases, but in matters of gun control, legislation in one state can be looser and

directly lead to traumatic incidents in states with stronger gun control.”

Others are less optimistic that stronger laws would have an impact. “It’s impossible to

actually break something down like this into a simple solution,” said University student Chris

Nied. “It’s impossible to legislate morality, and the fact that there are people out there that want

to do these kinds of heinous things is never going to change no matter what the law says…

finding what to do is a lot more difficult, a lot more nuanced, than just saying ‘oh pass this law.’”

“As a police department, we’re here to enforce the laws and make people as safe as we

can within the environment where these laws exist,” Wade said. “I just hope our legislators will

look at the situation and figure out what’s best for everyone. Hopefully police departments will

have some input too, so we can coordinate that and work together to make sure everyone is going

to be safe.”

Connor Ciecko
connor@cdcko.com