The University of Iowa police were called to Burge Residence Hall on Oct. 15 after they received a call from a student who reported having received a text from a friend saying there was an “active shooter in Burge” and to call the police. However, eight minutes after this initial call was made, the student called the UI police again to say that the friend who had texted him was joking.
At the risk of sounding too obvious, I’d just like to remind everyone that joking about a shooter being anywhere on campus isn’t cool. Joking about someone having a gun anywhere at any time is not OK.
Upsettingly, it seems as if we’ve gotten to a point where reading about a shooting is becoming everyday. We’ve gotten used to it. I think this says a lot about many things, mainly the intense splinter that seems to be happening in our country and the world, along with our lack of mental health care and lack of gun-control laws.
And the scary thing is, it seems to have gotten to a point where I, at least, am thinking, “Well, someone shouldn’t be joking about this happening because that means police forces are taken away from perhaps handling an actual dangerous situation,” instead of thinking, perhaps, “This shouldn’t be joked about because such violence shouldn’t be joked about to begin with.”
When I read about the “active” shooter at Burge, I definitely was not as taken aback as I should have been. While I admit that this may have been in part due to the headline of the story saying it was just a prank, it still did not elicit enough of a response from me. Could this be because we as a country have grown so desensitized to shootings?
According to Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit organization that compiles information about gun-related violence in the United States, there have been 11,648 deaths in 2016 alone due to a gunshot. Also according to the archive, a mass shooting is defined as an incident in which four or more people are wounded or killed. With this definition, there have been 307 mass shootings in the U.S. to date.
