Sometimes the gimmick of #onlyatGW can be overused and well, #gimmicky, but there are times where something happens that is so monumental where you can’t help but think “that could only happen at GW”. Monday’s shooting at the Navy Yard, and the immediate closeness felt by GW students, was one of those moments.
If you did not pay attention to the news or Twitter (however impossible that is at GW), campus would have seemed extremely normal. While students went about their busy Mondays as usual, just a couple miles away a mass shooting was occurring. Naturally, everyone on campus was talking about it and wondering if Foggy Bottom was next.
Eventually the fervor died down as the police declared the only shooter dead. But for most of the day, students everywhere on campus were on edge. All wondered what President Obama, just blocks away, was doing or thinking. Only at GW can you feel this proximity to the White House in such a palpable and tangible fashion.
President Obama spoke at a memorial for the 12 victims of the shooting today. He said that these types of shootings, which have become all too present in the recent past, “ought to obsess us”. Whatever your political leanings or stance on gun control, it is true that whatever happens at the White House obsesses us. We live in our nation’s capital and the presence news trucks on campus when a national tragedy occurs is not rare. One of the victims was pronounced dead at the GW Hospital. These headline-making experiences, whether they be tragic as a mass shooting, or celebratory as an inagural ball, are what makes GW unique. It really does happen #onlyatGW.