After hearing about this morning’s massacre at Virginia Tech, I am horrified. This past weekend I spent Saturday and Sunday at UC Berkeley for a conference, where I spent the night at the apartment of one of my sister’s friends. Even after what happened at Columbine, I think that my self and many others unconsciously thing of our school campus as a green zone area of safety. I remember in Middle School, my teacher told me that of there was every an earthquake, the school building would be one of the safest places for us to be since the building was made on bedrock. At my current high school, even though I get annoyed by some of the security guards, the fact that they are there is comforting to know. So when something like this happens, I am shocked, even though in the back of my mind I feel like I shouldn’t be. Maybe I’m just paranoid, but a mass massacre such as this, where a gunman kills 32 students and then commits suicide, seems like a warning sign telling me not to ever let my guard down. But now I wonder – where is there a safe place for me to be. Our house is very old, typical of many homes in San Francisco, and we definitely don’t have a top of the line security system. But still, at home one feels safe. I feel safe knowing that my dada is in the room right next to me. But in that same sense, I feel safe at school knowing there are security guards monitoring the hallways. Is that enough to keep people from worrying? It is really frightening to know that the deadliest rampage in modern U.S. History took place at a school. It’s also frightening to know how late there was an alarm on campus about the event – almost two hours after the shootings had occurred. As with any tragedy, I hope other campuses can hope to try to have a better and more effective security system to prevent such a massacre from happening in the future, and also to have a more adequate response system to such a situation. – Maahum Chaudhry