I’m sitting in a small square room, cluttered with books and papers, at the end of a short dead-end corridor. I’m a history professor at a small university, sitting in my office alone, hearing the news that 800 miles away, a Delta State University history professor has been shot and killed in his office. It’s all too easy to picture being trapped behind my own desk, unable to escape, to dodge, to do anything but plead.
I didn’t know Ethan Schmidt, but I know one of his colleagues in his four-person department. I know at least a little bit about his training and his work as an assistant professor. I can imagine his pleasure at publishing a book with a university press or when he won a teaching award at his previous job, Texas Tech: Lubbock.
I know that he was a scholar of, as described by a former professor, “how the use of force came to be unquestioned” in American culture. He might have had important things to say about our collective reaction to yet another campus murder.
Universities suddenly feel hazardous. In a few weeks, my university is going to do an active shooter drill. They have to do it, given that there have just been too many school shootings to ignore the necessity to plan for such an event.
But I, like many of my colleagues, am freaked out by the idea that early October we’ll be ordered to practice barricading ourselves in our offices, sheltering in place.
Professors are especially easy targets. We publish our course schedules and office hours online, so students can find us when they need to do so. We make ourselves available. On a day like yesterday, as the story unfurled of one professor killing another, then taking his own life, we feel like easy targets for an armed person with a grudge. Universities feel like battlegrounds.
Feelings can mislead. There are places where gun violence is endemic, and universities are not among them. The real story is that in America, guns and their violence have permeated our lives, entering into places we hold sacred or think should be safe, from places of education for both children and adults, to places of worship, and even live on the air.
For white, upper-middle class Americans like me, these startling incursions of gun violence into my world reveal both the intense privileges of my life and a stark truth — these events are not random. The death of Ethan Schmidt is part of a pattern, not an assault on universities, but an assault on America, fueled by easy access to firearms.
My emotional reaction to the death of a professor has made me consider the rhetoric that there’s now a “war on cops.” Police officers react to events like the death of Deputy Darren H. Goforth in Houston, feeling themselves to be under siege. And they are under siege, but it’s not from critics of police brutality, but the simple fact of too many guns.
Last year, 47 officers were killed by firearms, as recorded by the Officer Down Memorial Page. A few were killed with their own weapons or by high-powered rifles but the vast majority were killed by people wielding handguns.
In far too many cases, a routine encounter (law enforcement experts debate whether any encounter can be considered routine) suddenly turned violent when a suspect drew a weapon. Often the suspect was out on parole, known to be dangerous, yet apparently had no trouble acquiring a gun. It’s dangerous out there, not because of Black Lives Matter activists, but because criminals have no trouble getting guns.
As I head back towards my classroom, determined not to be afraid, I can’t tell you that I feel any hope that Schmidt’s death will change anything. A nation that does nothing after the murder of 20 school children at Sandy Hook is not going to act after the murder of a single history professor or after the murder of a single police officer.
But we do have to name these killings for what they are — a natural consequence of a society that just has too many guns, too few controls, and no political process that can do anything about it.