People with guns killing people on campuses

There are so many campus murders, usually with guns, that most of us are not too removed from them. Maybe you’ve been on campus during a shooting, and if not, then maybe you are colleagues or personal friends with people who have been though that trauma. How many degrees of separation are you from how many shootings? Here is an accounting for me. I don’t think mine is noteworthy in any particular way. I think many scientists working in the United States of America have similar connections to shootings, and many have been much closer to one or more.

I studied physics at the University of Iowa, just a few years after the Gang Lu shootings. My sister was nearby when the shooting happened, and could have crossed paths with the shooter on the day of the murders if her schedule had been slightly different. Many of our professors quietly carried the trauma. My plasma physics class used a textbook written by one of the victims. All of our classes were in Van Allen Hall, the site of the shootings. I saw Miya Rodolfo-Sioso, who was paralyzed by the attack, in the pedestrian mall in the summer.

When I was at UNC-Chapel Hill, a fellow researcher Feng Liu was killed during a lunchtime walk, in a neighborhood about a 10 minute walk from where the rest of us were working on campus that day.

Today there is an on-campus shooter murdering and traumatizing our colleagues at UNC. And that’s what prompted this post.

I now work at UCSB, where the college town, Isla Vista, was traumatized in 2014.

Restricting access to guns, ammunition, high capacity magazines, and so forth won’t solve everything. Some of the murders mentioned above don’t even involve guns. But if done well, new firearm regulations can help. We can do a lot better. And we can do more.