As you probably already know, this week there was an armed gunman on the Queens campus of St. John's University. He was apparently wearing a George Bush mask and armed with a single shot rifle. Fortunately no one was injured and things are back to the norm for the most part.

St. John's did a great job in handling the situation. They communicated to the whole school using their newly established communication system. Essentially they just text message or voice message the students and faculty that are signed up. Even though everyone is not registered for it (you have to go sign up) the word spreads pretty quickly from the people who are in the system. There was an immediate lock down of the whole campus, including the Staten Island campus. This is because it was initially unclear which campus the gunman was on. Of course it was frightening when the news of a gunman on campus was announced, but i felt safe because of the lock down. After an hour or so the gunman was apprehended and the police searched the campus extensively for another possible suspect.

After seeing how promptly the university responded to a potential catastrophe, I feel pretty safe on campus. It's just unfortunate that it took the VA tech. incident to bring about this unprecedented level of security.