Human beings naturally want to make sense out of senseless things.

April 16, 2007 was a senseless day. It was a nightmare that unfolded so slowly, we didn’t realize how horrific it was until it was over. For me, I happened to notice a headline on Yahoo news in the morning: 1 dead and 1 wounded in Virginia Tech shooting. Sad, yes, but I kind of forgot about it as I got my son off to kindergarten and headed off to work. In the afternoon, as I was walking from the library to my classroom, I passed a TV surrounded by students watching CNN. The death toll was up to 21. I called my husband to find out what had happened. “Some crazy guy just started shooting people,” he said. By the time my class was over, 33 people had died.

My students weren’t talking about it much. They are busy getting ready for finals, and many of them hadn’t had time to look at the news all day. Now that the full magnitude of what happened has set in, though, people are subdued.

Since I work on a college campus, I can’t help but wonder: what if it had happened here? Would our police have reacted differently? Would they have closed the campus after the first two shootings in the morning? Would a gunman be able to trap students in a building and pick them off one by one? The truth is, this tragedy could probably have happened at all the universities I’ve known.

The campus where I currently teach is large and urban. If someone had shot a couple people in the dorms a quarter mile from the building where I teach, I doubt if our police would have closed the whole school down. There are a lot of buildings between the dorms and my classroom. Police would probably not have considered it necessary to lock down my building. I probably would not have considered it necessary.

Would a gunman have been able to trap students in my building? Sure. It’s six stories, three stairwells and one elevator. Each classroom has only one door as most classrooms do, and the upper story windows are unable to be opened. It wouldn’t take much to pick us off – just a gun and a lack of conscience.

And I’m sure my school has a loose cannon or two just waiting for their fuses to be lit. Once in a while, I hear scary stories from my colleagues about students who write disturbing papers or even threaten their professors or classmates. I have been lucky enough never to have such a student in my own class. Yet.

So now the investigations and the debates have begun. What set him off? Why did he wait two hours between the first shootings and the later ones? Why did he have the words “Ismail Ax” on his arm? Why didn’t the police lock down the campus? Why don’t we have tougher gun laws? How can we make schools safer? Why is the United States experiencing so many school shootings?

The very sad thing is that most of these questions just cannot be answered. Not in any useful way. We may be able to make some changes; we may be more aware, but it will probably be temporary.

This tragedy was senseless. That may be the hardest thing for us to come to terms with.