Gun me down

Before we get to what I wrote the other day about the gunplay at Towson University, there is this update from the Associated Press about it:

TOWSON, Md. (AP) — Baltimore County police have charged a 19-year-old Greenbelt man, who they said fired a gun at an unsanctioned gathering of hundreds of people at Towson University, striking himself and two others.

Samuel Nnam was arrested a short time after he was released from a hospital and charged with attempted first-degree murder, first-degree assault, and second-degree assault, police said in a news release Tuesday night. Nnam is being held without bail. Online court records do not list an attorney for Nnam.

The university announced earlier Tuesday that it placed a veteran campus police officer on paid leave during an investigation into whether “established procedures” were performed during the unsanctioned gathering.

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Thanks to the unstinting efforts of the NRA and their 2A devotees, handguns are as common at parties as beer cans and Doritos, so it was hardly a surprise to anyone that three people - one a student - were shot early last Saturday morning at Towson University in my dear old hometown. 

Videos are going around, showing 500 people gathered in what they call Freedom Square, in the middle of the university's academic buildings, around 2 in the morning. People are seen swaying to a beat, dancing, if you will. 

And then, as they say on the news, "gunshots rang out" and now "security will be beefed up." Three were shot, all will live, one was a female student, and no one has any idea a-tall who the shooter(s) was/were. 

The University brass just about threw their backs out of whack, pointing fingers away from themselves.  "This was an unsanctioned event!" they huffed. "Nothing to do with us! We knew nothing!"

But you should have.

"It was just like a lot of chaos. Everyone was screaming, just sprinting across the bridge because they didn't know what was happening. They thought the shooter was chasing them," Towson University student Sofia Merkowitz-Bustos told WBAL-TV.

There are chalkboards in Freedom Square where students, in between rounds of gunfire, can express themselves in words, and that is what some were doing the other day, hoping to send some light and positivity.

I have two questions, as always. For one thing, Towson University has a full-time, 24 hour police department composed of sworn, trained police, not Paul Blart Mall Cop security guards. How on earth was a gathering of 500 people going on in the middle of the campus without attracting the attention of the TUPD, and some sort of response? I assume that no one had a gathering permit to have this party, so why was it going on unimpeded? Someone was supposed to be on patrol then. Where were they?

All the U will say now is the standard "we have looked over the situation and we will redouble our blah blah blah". NOW they decide they need to patrol a little more carefully and keep an eye on the billion dollar campus, and its tens of thousands of students, over there. 

There is no reason for this to have happened and they know this, and "moving forward we shall do better" is not going to cut it. Someone should explain just where all their police were that night.

And another thing. I saw parents on TV demanding to know why they were not notified about what they call a school shooting. This is different from a shooting in a public school, K-12. It is assumed that college students are adults and responsible for themselves. When a college student is failing a class, the professor does not call his or her parents in for a chat. 

It's true, that gap from high school graduation to college classes beginning is just a few weeks. But in that time, let's suggest to parents that they remind their campus-bound progeny that nothing good comes from being in a crowd of 500 people after midnight. 

And let's remind the Towson U police and administration about that, too!

There was a time when the entire community would be enraged by this desecration, but with the constant barrage of bad news, it's just one more log floating past in the stream of consciousness.