How I was Affected by the UAH School Shooting

The University of Alabama in Huntsville has been a big part of my life for a long time. I was a student there for many years, probably more than I should have been, and received my B.A from there. The day of the shooting, Friday the 12 of February, I was on the campus again.

For anyone who hasn't heard the news, biology professor Amy Bishop opened fire at a staff meeting and killed three people. At the time of this publication, three are wounded but survived the shooting.

The day of the killing I was in Madison Hall, the building next to Shelby Hall where the event occurred. I had been there before to take math classes, but yesterday I was there to turn in my graduate application. I was excited because I was also turning in an application for a graduate teaching assistantship. I wanted to be like those men and women sitting in the staff meeting -- I still do; I wanted more than anything to be a professor at a distinguished college like UAH.

I don't personally know Amy Bishop, who was a graduate from Harvard with a doctorate. I couldn't tell you if she ever behaved strangely or not. I just keep thinking that it didn't have to be the Biology Department, that it could have been the English Department and that I could have been there. Or Dr. Schenker could have been there, or Dr. Early, or any one of the many professors that had so much influence on me and who I care so much about.

My first reaction to the news was one of surprise and disbelief. When we here in the Huntsville areas learned of the news, the media still did not know if the shooter and victims were students or faculty. I assumed it would be a student, echoing the tragedy at Virginia State and still more recently, and here in our city, the murder of a 14 year old boy at a middle school by another student. I felt, and still feel, that in this country we are losing our feeling of having safe places to go. Classrooms and high schools aren't safe; we already knew the workplace, the shopping malls weren't safe; now even my beloved university doesn't feel safe.

I even seriously considered buying a gun, and I don't like guns. I don't even like holding guns. Yet I felt that I was so close to somewhere where I would have needed one. Maybe all these recent tragedies have left me feeling more paranoid and morbid than usual, but I increasingly feel a sense of desperation and urgency.

My heart goes out to the grieving family members of the victims. This was truly a senseless act that should not have happened.