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Greetings, gang.

I am currently in my office sheltering in place because of an ongoing active shooter situation on my campus. I just want to assure all of you that I am currently safe in a locked building. I will write more later to let you know what is going on/what happened.

I hope you stay safe, and the shooter is quickly neutralized! We would hate to lose you!

Gunnar wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 17, 2025 5:41 pm

I hope you stay safe, and the shooter is quickly neutralized! We would hate to lose you!

Thanks, Gunnar.

One shooter has been apprehended.

Six people are hospitalized. One of them is in critical condition.

The all clear has not yet been given. I remain in my office.

Sending positive thoughts into the universe, stay safe Kish.

Good Lord!! I just watched the news about this.

Stay safe Kish!

Hopefully this is over by now, if it's not, please do not follow Hound's suggestion from the other thread to go for a walk.

Molok wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 17, 2025 8:04 pm

Sending positive thoughts into the universe, stay safe Kish.

Thanks, Molok!

Everybody Wang Chung wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 17, 2025 8:07 pm

Good Lord!! I just watched the news about this.

Stay safe Kish!

Thanks, Everybody Wang Chung!

Gadianton wrote: ↑

Thu Apr 17, 2025 11:48 pm

Hopefully this is over by now, if it's not, please do not follow Hound's suggestion from the other thread to go for a walk.

Thanks, Gadianton. Yes, Hound is a pretty disturbed person.

OK, so here is my report on the day's events.

I first learned of the active shooter a little after noon, after searching online for an explanation for all of the sirens I had been hearing for the past 20 minutes. I immediately ran to a colleague's office to warn her of the active shooter. The staff colleague next door stopped us to inform us that we were to shelter in place, which is what we did until 2:15 in the afternoon. In that time, information trickled in, much of it misleading. We stood around the office commiserating about the second active shooter on campus in a little over a decade. Later, I would find out that some of the students in the shooter's vicinity were survivors of the Parkland shooting. Can you imagine directly experiencing two active shooting incidents at school?

We got word that the Psychology Department had been allowed to leave, so everyone started to leave our office suite, faculty, staff, and students, and I was not about to stay behind, so I joined them and started driving home. The mood during the wait was definitely eerie. I never heard the shots, but we were stunned by the immense uncertainty and deeply worried about the welfare of those we know and those we don't in our FSU community. Many of us mentioned about how surreal our time is. Everything is so uncertain. Our country no longer feels like our own. At any moment, any one of us might walk into a fusillade of bullets. You have the unsettling sense that you must be in the wrong place, the wrong timeline.

As I drove home, my spouse and I talked on the phone. Information about the shooter started to come in. 20 years old. Male. White. Political Science major. Son of a sheriff's office resource officer for a public school, and he used his mother's old service weapon as well as a rifle. Evidently anti-Trump, but this is unclear (people read the evidence according to their bias). The last part had me especially worried because of both the national and state political climates. Now that Trump has so much power and little restraint in using it, how will this be used to forward their agenda? The idea of arming faculty has been raised in Florida. Not sure I want to pack heat in the classroom. Honestly, guns are a terrible distraction from education, and I have no fear of guns as a former gun owner and recreational shooter.

Two people are dead. Six other victims were wounded. The shooter, wearing an orange shirt and kaki shorts, drove up next to the Student Union in his orange Hummer, casually got out with a rifle and shot at a student. He missed, then he went back to the Hummer, pulled out his mother's pistol, and shot and killed a woman standing five feet in front of him. The horror.