How the senseless Michigan State shooting shattered Spartan Nation
When a friend who lives one town over from Michigan State University in East Lansing texted me on Monday night about the shooting on campus, I felt a sense of dread. It wasn’t hard to envision what was unfolding at my alma mater, a school I have visited many times since my college days.
On a Monday night in February, anyone out on campus was most likely at a night class or taking part in a study group. Maybe their student organization was meeting. Maybe they were counting the minutes until the professor would finish, so they could get home and sign a card for their Valentine.
Instead, the lives of three students ended, and five more are in limbo. The alleged gunman, Anthony Dwayne McRae, killed himself as police closed in. His father told NBC that McRae was never the same after his mother died in 2020.
McRae’s rampage added another campus to the list of mass shootings, only this time, it was ours. The Spartan Nation — known for its shouts of “Go green! Go white!” — was devastated.
I could not help but think of the shooting in 2021 at Oxford High School, north of Detroit, where four students were killed and seven others were injured. Some Oxford High students subsequently enrolled at MSU; now they have gone through two high-profile shootings in the past 15 months.
The MSU campus is vast.
Its sprawl is the size of a small Midwest city, 5,200 acres across about eight square miles, with more than 50,000 students. It doesn’t offer the compact, pristine setting of an Ivy League school, or the manicured beauty of a Stanford or Vanderbilt.
But MSU — in 1862, it became the first land-grant university in the nation — has plenty of character. Hollywood used many campus buildings as backdrops for the 2016 movie “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.” There’s the modern, angular Broad Art Museum designed by Zaha Hadid, which continues to divide opinions; older brick-andstone buildings such as Berkey Hall, where I recall savoring my history classes; and the nearly century-old MSU Union. Berkey and the Union are now crime scenes.
The campus also has acres of woodland, a scenic river and plenty of Big Ten sports facilities. MSU has a renowned veterinary school, nicknamed by students, perhaps inevitably, Moo U.
The campus is just far enough from Detroit, about an hour and a half drive, to escape suburban and exurban sprawl, but it is only a few miles from the Michigan Capitol in Lansing, where the nation’s political strife has made its mark. Now, MSU has become the latest school thrust into the debate over gun laws.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), herself the subject of a failed kidnapping plot, was clearly distressed on Tuesday morning at one of the multiple briefings held by campus and local police and the FBI since the tragedy unfolded.
In November, she was reelected after promising to push for stricter gun laws. In January, she stood before the state legislature and declared, “The time for only thoughts and prayers is over.”
She wants the legislature to adopt a “common sense” package that includes universal background checks and a series of red-flag measures that allow a judge to take guns away from someone who poses a threat. Red-flag laws have been enacted in 19 states. She wants safe-storage laws requiring owners to keep guns locked away.
Whitmer made it clear she doesn’t want to prevent the state’s avid hunters from owning firearms, nor does she want to restrict legal gun ownership. Before we sold my late mother’s home last year, I possessed my late father’s hunting rifle but let it go in the estate sale. I was no longer comfortable owning it.
Whitmer’s proposals on gun ownership in recent years were blocked by a Republican-controlled legislature. But last fall, the legislature swung back to the Democrats. Maybe the governor’s proposals will have a chance this time.
Amid the calls for action on Tuesday, it was heartening to see a goodwill tweet from the new University of Michigan president, Santa Ono. The universities have a long-standing but affectionate rivalry. Michigan students planned to hold a campus vigil Tuesday night for their counterparts 60 miles away, some of whom were their high school classmates.
Maybe that’s all we can expect — communal expressions of sadness after yet another campus shooting. But in Michigan, at least, there’s hope that things might change in a legislature just down the road from where the latest crime occurred.