A quick 6-hour drive south from Marquette can get you to the campus of Saginaw Valley State University. This fellow university is the home to many friends, acquaintances and even sports rivals to us at NMU.

Here, while students happily celebrated a football game victory and the fresh start of the academic year, a shooter opened fire and injured five people. As of press time, the two shooter suspects are still at large.

This increasingly common nightmare event is too close to home. It can be easy to dismiss a shooting by thinking that a tragedy like that will never happen to someplace like Marquette, but with each event getting closer it becomes more of a reality that NMU isn’t immune.

It is true that Marquette ranks 21st in Safewise’s 2016 report of the 30 safest college towns in America, and that’s admirable. Students have a common mindset that we are safe and comfortable here, on campus as well as off campus.

We sometimes leave dorm doors, cars and lockers unlocked either by mistake or simply because we don’t feel the need to lock them. We’re fortunate enough that oftentimes nothing happens, but sometimes crime does happen. Things do get stolen.

People do get hurt.

Public Safety is overseeing the installation of new security cameras across campus, and there will be about 700 total cameras installed by next fall. While this may seem Orwellian, we believe these are necessary.

These cameras are in high traffic, public areas including entrances and exits. The cameras do not invade the privacy of dorm rooms or bathrooms.

Relatively new security measures also include 24/7 locked residence halls and removal of overgrown bushes by buildings and sidewalks. In addition, we still have the classic blue light emergency phones, emergency text alerts, and officers on call, plus many more.

These measures are not excessive and not invasive by any means. Extra cameras, locked doors and removal of potential hiding places are precautionary. We can’t foresee the future, but we can follow practices that make NMU an even safer place.

We can have tools and guidelines at the ready in the case of a dangerous situation.

And lastly we can stand in solidarity with our fellow university students downstate at SVSU.