Most recent University of Cincinnati Shooting
Ohioans for Concealed Carry Weighs In – (No, I do not support gun control or concealed carry legislation. )
The University of Cincinnati of “tower of strength/rock of truth” fame has, once again, experienced a shooting. Kind of scary. Just kind of. After four years of living in this neighborhood, I’m still completely in denial that there is an on-campus shooting about once a year. Actually, who knows, I can only remember two on-campus shootings (and one off-campus shooting involving a student who was caught in the crossfire).
Our latest and greatest episode occurred at 3:30am on Sunday, May 27th 2007. In other words, yesterday. Four shots were fired in the lobby of Calhoun Hall as a result of a confrontation between UC students and some local Cincinnatians. No one was injured, which seems like something of a miracle, and the police department has agreed to post an officer in the building through “at least the remainder of the day Sunday.”
Take a deep breath everyone, we’re going to be ok! The Cincinnati police have agreed to provide a few hours of coverage. If I were living in Calhoun Hall (and I did live next door for two years), I think I’d be more comfortable if they had someone guaranteed to be there for, say, the next week or so. Given that the first shooting occurred at 3:30am, is daytime coverage really what we need most? And can we not guarantee more than 24 hours of coverage?
I would like to say that I doubt UC students will stay in Calhoun. I would like to think that everyone will move to a safer area. However, I consider Calhoun Hall safer than my last off campus apartment. Also, there is a paucity of safer areas to move to, unless you have a car. With Cincinnati Metro (public bus system) providing free student transportation these days, it could be somewhat easier, but I doubt more than one or two students will leave, if any.
How do I know? Experience. In order to live here, most of us block out the fact that it is an incredibly dangerous neighborhood. We console ourselves with the fact that it has become safer (thanks to UC buying up the surrounding neighborhoods), that most crimes are mere robberies, and that we take precautions. Because only people who aren’t careful get robbed, right? In a way, yes. A lot of the people who get robbed are doing things that common sense might dictate against. Still, this is college. Isn’t just about everyone doing more than one thing that could be labeled senseless? It’s kind of the nature of the beast here.
Anyways, back to the point. I know that most people in Calhoun Hall will stay because in a similar and equally dangerous situation in the fall of 2003 in neighboring Siddall Hall, no one left. The night before the first day of finals week that December, Drano bombs were discovered scattered around the dorm. Everyone was evacuated, and, luckily, no one was hurt. The bombs were discovered before the majority of them exploded. However, the fact that they were planted outside several main entrances to the building as well as inside one of the communal bathrooms made many people a little anxious.
It took us a long time to hear what had happened, because we had all been evacuated to Fifth-Third Arena where we waited from the wee hours of the morning until around 7am. As I can recall, my singing final at 8am went less than splendidly.
In any case, I was scared. Really scared. I didn’t want to take anyone’s word anymore that taking reasonable precautions was a perfectly effective means of preventing crime. How can you believe something like that when you’re stuck sleeping in a gymnasium waiting to hear exactly what some wacko did hoping to maim/kill a bunch of fellow students? (Yes, the perpetrator was one of the residents.)
Still, even after all of that, I lived in that dorm for the rest of the year. And the year after that. (ok, NOT my choice, but I could have lived in a different dorm.) I never even seriously considered moving. It seems idiotic in retrospect, but the neighborhood is what it is, and you can’t really escape the crime that seems destined to take place. Still, I’m surprised that we took the incident so lightly.
At the end of the day, bad things happen to good people. A lot. And if we all flipped out and completely altered our lives as a response then there would be no point in living. At the same time, how much is too much? Can parents afford to let their children go to school in this neighborhood? Does the education balance out the risks? Does the price? How far does it have to go before a majority of the students do leave?
And what did we as a society do to produce the type of human beings capable of such violence?
[...] feel like we were all just starting to forget the Calhoun Hall shooting. In fact, I even wrote an article about that event titled “Another University of Cincinnati [...]