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Northwestern University tweeted there is a person with a gun on its Evanston campus. Students and faculty have been told to shelter in place after a person with a gun was reported on the Evanston campus.
A person with a gun was reported at Northwestern University at 3:55 p.m. According to university officials, an armed person may be inside Engelhart Hall at Emerson and Maple. People are being urged to either shelter in place or avoid the area.
Update 4:45 P.M:
According to police chief Ryan Glew, someone called the police saying that he shot his girlfriend; at this time, they are starting to think that the whole thing was a hoax due to the lack of evidence.
University spokesman Jon Yates said that the Northwestern University Police Department is on the scene. Authorities are currently searching the campus, however, they have not found “evidence of a victim, scene, or gunman”
Engelhart Hall is a graduate student dormitory at Northwestern.
The Evanston Police Department tweeted that Evanston and NUPD checked the area and found no evidence of a victim, scene, or gunman found.
via Twitter:
“There is a report of a person with a gun in Engelhart Hall at the corner of Emerson Street and Maple Avenue. Evanston and Northwestern University police are on the scene. Seek shelter if in the area.”
Northwestern University is a private research university based in Evanston, Illinois, United States, with other campuses located in Chicago and Doha, Qatar, and academic programs and facilities in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, California.
The shooting comes at a time of heightened awareness about our nation’s gun laws due to the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead. The reports of a gunman come on the same day as National School Walkout Day, where students across the country walked out of class to protest the nation’s gun laws.
The University is a founding member of the Big Ten Conference and is the only private university in the conference.
Mass shootings have plagued the United States for years now, with the massacres at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and a country music festival in Las Vegas being just a few of these tragedies that have left people with too many bodies to bury and not enough questions answered.
According to CNN, the United States makes up less than 5% of the global population, yet possesses 31% of its mass shooters. In addition, the gun homicide rate is more than 25x higher than other developed, high-income countries. The discussion over whether there is a correlation between these statistics and the number of guns in the United States is a matter of debate, which has only intensified in response to these incidents.
The rise in these shootings, with one seemingly happening every other day, has caused public discourse regarding gun control to escalate dramatically. In response to incidents like Stoneman Douglas, students have staged walkouts and activists have rallied in an effort to convince politicians to enact stricter gun control laws. These endeavors have faced resistance from gun activists and second amendment defenders.