| On April 16, 2007, my friend Christopher James (Jamie) Bishop was shot and killed at Virginia Tech when he was teaching a German class. He was among the 32 people massacred by Cho Seung-Hui. Jamie’s wife, Stephanie Hofer, also a professor of German, now faces unimaginable grief as well as a future as a young widow. Jamie was the gentlest, most caring person I have ever met. His sudden death was senseless and should have been prevented.
My original impulse when I heard the news was to grieve with the support of my friends and family. However, I realized that by keeping this to myself, I am doing a disservice to my community. This tragedy, and all the other school shootings that preceded it, might easily be perceived as distant events, removed from our lives. Or worse, we might come to uncritically accept school shootings, or potentially even expect them as regular occurrences.
I write with the hope that these murders do not slip into a public amnesia. Each time someone is shot, we collectively suffer loss. We are, after all, deeply interconnected beings in ways that we’re often unaware. We are at risk if we think these shootings don’t affect us. They could feasibly happen here.
Moreover, these events connect with other deeper, more troubling issues in our society. Is our future to inhabit classrooms with locked doors and security checks? Are professors and students going to be responsible for enacting security drills, so that we are "prepared" for the unspeakable? Are we willing to co-construct this culture of fear in response to our increasingly violent surroundings?
I propose that we take a different direction. We could begin by having thoughtful and sustained public discussions about violence, especially gendered violence. After all, the killers so far have been young men. What is the significance of this?
We could also discuss feasible solutions for gun control, ones that do not place the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of rural people, as the Canadian gun registry tends to do. We may even need to dig deeper into the broader geopolitics of international arms trade and acquisition, a much more frightening and difficult prospect.
We also could address what public resources are available to help us deal with stress, disappointment, isolation and mental illness. How supportive are our social networks; how much do we care for and about one another, especially those who are "different" than us?
Our schools should not be places where we fear for our safety. They should be places where students and faculty struggle over ideas, engage in new thought, argue (civilly!) with each other, meet new people, experiment with new concepts. University is the place where, if we’re living up to our potential, we collectively become more intelligent, more politically engaged, more compassionate people. Above all else, we’re learning how to think critically so that we’re capable of addressing, and hopefully solving, complex social problems such as this one.
Jamie Bishop’s death, as well as the deaths of all the people who have been gunned down, was senseless, but it doesn’t need to be meaningless. These tragedies show us, repeatedly, that something is wrong and that things need to be changed. We cannot afford the luxury of treating this as if it’s someone else’s problem, or that it’s inevitable, or that it won’t change so why bother trying.
With vision, collective action and sound leadership, we can work to foster the conditions such that, hopefully, we won’t ever have to face another tragic mass murder in our schools. My hope is that Jamie’s death will spur changes in all of us, so that we can approach this shooting as an immediate and collective concern. In doing so, we might also begin to transform the fear, violence and hatred currently tearing apart our social fabric.
Gwendolyn Blue is an assistant professor in the University of Calgary's Faculty of Communication and Culture. |
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