Tragedy struck yet another college campus Thursday, when a gunman burst into a Northern Illinois University lecture hall and opened fire.

Steve Kazmierczak, the gunman, killed five students and himself, and wounded 16 others. The event has left NIU’s campus awestruck as students and family mourn the loss.

We express our deepest sympathies toward NIU – not only as students at a fellow Mid-American Conference school, but as people who, when reminded of our vulnerability, can hardly fathom experiencing such misery.

Though the memories will linger, the best we can offer is a show of solidarity: a mark of support to let NIU know it is not alone in a world that, for now, seems unfairly cruel.

While it would be na’ve to assume academic institutions are perfectly safe, campus shootings nevertheless always are unsettling. The thought of being shaken from our desks to the sound of gunshots is spine chilling.

Police officers arrived at the lecture hall within two minutes, according to the New York Times, but by then it was too late.

It takes only a few seconds to leave the indelible mark of a campus tragedy. Sophisticated response systems can mitigate further harm, but irreparable wounds, both physical and psychological, already have been made.

It’s natural to turn to talks of prevention, but NIU’s shooter seemed immune to that, as well. Kazmierczak exhibited few signs of the archetypal brooding outcast. In fact, several professors described the University of Illinois graduate student as quite personable, the Times reported.

While an undergraduate at Northern Illinois, he served as a teaching assistant and received a dean’s award.

By most exterior evaluations, Kazmierczak was an upstanding student. The only warning sign was that he stopped taking his medication and became somewhat erratic during the past few weeks. But even that does not seem to bode an action of this scope.

Students, as always, should report all suspicious behavior.

But sometimes that behavior is not conspicuous. And sometimes an advanced response system is not fast enough.

What do we do?

There is only so much the usual charade of finger-pointing can accomplish. In this case, all fingers seem to point toward one thing: terrible misfortune, the likes of which we can only hope never occurs.

The infuriating inevitability of it all is most chilling. But though we seem powerless in prevention, we at least can feel powerful in recuperation.

By standing together, though such horrors shake us to our cores, they do not destroy us.

E-mail the author: defaultuser