Virginia Tech Could Happen in Lots of Places

I'm numb over the Virginia Tech shootings trying to imagine what students went through as they and their friends were being hunted down; imagining what their families are going through.

This could happen in my college town of Morehead, KY and hundreds of other little college towns as well. A lot of school shootings occur in rapidly growing rural communities or suburbs like Littleton, Colorado. What often seems to make these places volatile is the mixing of suburban genres with heavily rural ways of life and the guns that go with them. It's not one thing. It's the new pressures created by the mixing of populations that seems dangerous.

And how many hundreds of regional state universities and liberal arts colleges bring suburban atmospheres into heavily rural areas. It must be hundreds. There must be dozens in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania alone.

Morehead State is a good example. Morehead, KY was originally a highly rural area, but the university and hospital have been drawn in the Lexington, KY urban orbit and there's now a lot of suburban types in town with their kids going to local schools. People like me and my family. The shadow of violence has hung over the public schools for some time. Students threatened to pull off school shootings after Columbine and suspicious looking strangers started showing up at schools after the Lancaster shootings. With the killings at Virginia Tech, the specter of violence will probably start looming over Morehead State as disaffected guys get tempted to act out their rage at parents, classes, girlfriends, classmates, snobby cliques, slim hopes, or all of the above in new and more destructive ways.

Like high schools, colleges can be large-scale pressure cookers. I know that I put a fair amount of pressure on my students to excel and I'm not much different from other professors, employers, or anybody else.

Maybe it's time to rethink what we're doing.