Active shooter.
There is no phrase in our modern lexicon likely to produce more terror.
It is not clear when the phrase entered our national vocabulary. There have been mass shootings in public places almost as long as there have been firearms. Perhaps the phrase emerged with the Columbine shootings in 1999 or any of the mass shootings that followed.
Whenever the term became a part of our language, it is a phrase we hear with tragic regularity. Since Columbine, there have been 34 mass shootings in the U.S., That’s roughly two per year.
The U.S. Government defines “active shooter” as an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area.
Thursday morning, the terrifying phrase was sent out to thousands of students, faculty and staff on the campus of Mississippi State University.
Chaos ensued. For close to an hour, even after the threat had been resolved, groups of students were reported to have been seen running in terror from buildings around campus, a panic that began when the university’s emergency notification system sent out the chilling message at 10:16 a.m.: “Maroon Alert. Starkville Campus. Active shooter report at Carpenter Hall. Seek Safety Immediately.”
The incident itself was resolved quickly. MSU officials say they were notified by the Mississippi Highway Patrol of the “active shooter” at 10:10 a.m. The Maroon Alert was issued six minutes later. By 10:26, an unarmed 20-year-old freshman was taken into custody and MSU officials confirmed no gun was found and no shots were ever fired.
But that is not the narrative that unfolded on social media. Twitter feeds were full of reports of a person stalking the halls on campus firing shots.
In one Twitter feed, five different people tweeted reports of shots being fired in a span of less than two minutes. Other Twitter feeds reported shots being fired even after a Maroon Alert had notified that a person was in custody.
Reports of a second shooter on social media sent packs of students fleeing from buildings all over campus while others huddled behind make-shift barricades, monitoring smart phones for any information.
Eventually, calm was restored. By 2 p.m., the university had resumed normal operations.
By the end of the day, what was first believed to be one, possibly two, people shooting indiscriminately from one end of the Drill Field to the other may have been simply a disturbed student talking to someone on the phone about his suicidal thoughts.
While it may take some time to sort out what really happened Thursday morning, the one fact no longer in dispute is that there was never an active shooter on the MSU campus.
That is not to say that MSU acted irresponsibly. Far from it. Its actions were proper based on the information available at the time. The phrase “active shooter,” despite the terror it was bound to create, was appropriate to the situation at the time.
No doubt, over the coming days a clearer picture of what happened will emerge.
In the meantime, we ponder the role that social media, particularly Twitter, played in the panic that seized the campus over that chaotic hour.
In many situations, the ubiquitous presence of social media can be something that brings clarity to events. It provides eye-witness accounts in real time from multiple sources.
But in this case, at least, social media seemed to create confusion, not clarity, and it is not difficult to understand why.
In situations of extreme stress, what people see and hear is not always reliable. A student who has been informed of an active shooter may hear the sound of a textbook falling on the floor and echoing down an empty hallway and reasonably assume it to be a gunshot. A person sees a flurry of activity when looking out a window and “sees” a shooter stalking prey.
Those accounts speed through social media, often embellished as they move through our connected world.
MSU officials certainly understood the gravity of the phrase “active shooter” when the first Maroon Alert was issued. Social media took that chilling phrase and elevated it to a state of panic.
It should serve as a reminder that we live in a world where information is not only plentiful, but often wrong.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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