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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
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,
“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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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