Many colleges adopted new security procedures after the 1999 Columbine high school shooting. The Christian Science Monitor says that preventing and reacting to such attacks poses a daunting challenge to campuses that treasure open environments. “The world has changed and we now have to think about balancing the open campus with the secure campus,” says administrator Dennis Black of the University at Buffalo. “It’s Charles Whitman [who killed 16 at the University of Texas in 1966] and Columbine rolled into one.”
“For a period of time, colleges and universities will take the law-and-order approach, and it will make students and professors and administrators feel safer. They won’t be safer, but they’ll feel safer, and that isn’t a small thing,” says criminologist Jack Levin of Northeastern University. Determined shooters will always find a way to get to people, he says. While most people who exhibit warning signs will never pick up a gun, trying to reach them early on to make them feel less isolated can only help, he says. “If we wait until they want to kill a lot of people, it’s too late.”