Another college shooting occurred last week. And now the question is: where do we go from here?

Should we as a campus be worried? Maybe. Should we be looking at how we can strive to prevent something like this happening here or anywhere else? Absolutely.

Recently, there seems to be an explosion of violence on school campuses. Within the last two years alone, there have been eight shootings, resulting in the deaths of over 50 students in colleges and high schools across the U.S.

And with last year’s massacre at Virginia Tech University still fresh in our minds, yet another random shooting occurred at Northern Illinois University (NIU) last Thursday.

What’s frightening about these shootings is not only the arbitrary nature of these heinous acts, but also the fact that such a thing could happen anywhere? at any time. Even Stony Brook. But while we could focus on the frightening aspects of the school shootings and how we’re all “unsafe,” maybe we should think more about what we do, as a society, about these occurrences.

We hear things like “it happens” or “there wasn’t anything we could do” all the time, but do things like this just happen, and was there really anything we couldn’t do?

There’s never a straight answer, but one thing’s for sure: paranoia will get us nowhere.

A common feeling we all probably share at this point is the feeling of confusion and because of that, we need assurance.

How can we as a community — yes, a community — protect each other? In the event that something like this does occur, how do we deal with it smoothly?

Not to compare ourselves to a tragedy of such magnitude as one that occurred at NIU, but Stony Brook has also been reeling from a string of robberies and violence on campus itself. Are we prepared to deal with these kinds of situations? Or since it doesn’t affect us directly, do we not care? When is enough, enough?

Our thoughts and prayers go out to every single person affected by the shooting at NIU. We hope that, as a fellow college community, you will be able to pull through Thursday’s horrible events.