No. No, no no no! Another campus shooting.

Apparently it was someone who was not granted tenure. Even worse: a biology professor. And a woman. Someone like me - and yet, obviously, profoundly UNLIKE me in some very important ways.

I don't know. These kind of things make me profoundly sad. I remember my own tenure-seeking days and how stressed I was. But had I not got tenure? My response would have been very different: I would have started scanning the job ads for positions opening up somewhere else. I would have cried, and gone home and raged to my empty house, beat my fists on the walls, screamed and cried and cursed in private. I would have called my family and wept on the phone to them. But I would never have dreamed of hurting another person.

I know that universities are workplaces like everywhere else. But it's a horrible thing to think that your workplace might be unsafe...and not unsafe because there's asbestos in the building or you do research with pathogenic bacteria. The thing that I find so scary about these shooter incidents is that there is nothing you can do to take precautions...with hazardous bacteria you can wear a respirator and gloves, and work in a laminar flow hood. With things like snakes and alligators good training and care and attention can protect you. But a person bent on doing evil....you're defenseless. You can't plan for it, you can't foresee it, you can't try and prevent it.

And what an awful way - what a horrible, unspeakable way - to lose someone you loved. To have them suddenly taken from you like that, without a chance to say goodbye. Just, poof. My thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.

And with every one of these that happens, I can feel my campus inching closer to restrictions like metal detectors and requiring us to wear our IDs on a lanyard at all times (though in this case? That might mainly be to identify the bodies; it looks like it was a professor who failed to get tenure who did the shooting).

I know lots of workplaces have those restrictions, but I really like the relative freedom of my campus - where you can come and go at will, where no one has to check you in or out or inspect the bags you are carrying. I hope that doesn't wind up going away in the fear over keeping us "safe."

Because I think if a person is really bent on doing evil, no amount of restricting the movement of the innocent is going to truly keep the innocent "safe."