It’s been one year since a single armed student murdered 32 people and injured 25 more at Virginia Tech in the nation’s deadliest campus shooting.

Criticism of Virginia Tech’s administration and police response during the incident was fierce. Many people believe now that better communication and faster response could have saved dozens from harm.

As SF State President Robert A. Corrigan said in an e-mail to students in the days following the shootings, “Such events resonate on this campus as well. It is reasonable and necessary to ask what this campus does to keep its people safe…”

New directives and new leadership

Four months after the Virginia Tech massacre, California State University Chancellor Charles Reed issued an executive order to “further define the responsibilities and needs of an effective campus emergency management program.”

The order outlined 10 action items with eight sub-items, but the heading in bold was a single word: responsibility. And Reed’s language was clear: responsibility for campus safety lay directly with university presidents.

But at SF State, wheels were already turning to increase the university’s ability to plan and respond to crisis situations with impetus from SF State’s police chief Kirk Gaston and vice president of student affairs, Penny Saffold.

Within two months of Reed’s updated emergency directives, a new SF State Office of Emergency Preparedness opened with Gayle Orr-Smith serving as a full-time emergency preparedness coordinator.

Orr-Smith brought experience as San Francisco’s former deputy mayor for public safety. She had been responsible for the city’s emergency response during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and also spent nine years in the Detroit police department.

Specialized training and drills

On a Wednesday morning in early April, a man walked the halls of the Student Services Building firing a handgun while employees crouched under their desks or waited behind locked office doors.

That man was Capt. Anthony Duenas, commanding officer for the special operations division of the University Police Department, and he was playing the role of a shooting suspect for an emergency drill that he planned and helped to execute.

While walking through the halls and firing blank ammunition at predetermined locations, he was struck by the unimpeded access a potential shooter would have to human targets, as well as the challenges of effectively policing an open campus.

But Duenas said he doesn’t think many people would support locking campus down and personally doesn’t think a more visible police presence like metal detectors and searches facilitates a constructive learning environment.

“It’s the responsibility of police to adapt to challenges and the community’s role to prepare themselves,” he said. Duenas is charged with training officers in tactically correct responses to threats. Such responses needed to be changed in the wake of campus shootings across the country.

A former Marine, Duenas spent 20 years policing Cal State Hayward before coming to SF State in 2005. He is currently the assistant commander for the CSU’s critical response unit, a specially trained team assembled from multiple university police departments for deployment as needed throughout the CSU system.

In more ways than one, Duenas knows the drill. And he notes that not every threat to safety is external. “Every university police department battles with two things: budget and staffing,” he said.

But Duenas said he feels supported in his mandate and that he has never known Chief Gaston to ignore important equipment and training updates no matter the budget situation.

“It’s been a priority of the chief,” he said. “And that allows it to be a priority of mine.”

A gun problem, or a gun solution?

A conversation on gun control can never be far away from the discussion of campus shootings. And many people are left to wonder how and why emotionally imbalanced college students get access to assault rifles.

But a group of college students are lobbying for the right to bring more guns to school. Students for Concealed Carry on Campus want to see bans against guns on school property lifted, so individuals can carry permitted weapons.

At 18 years old, Zachary Markowitz is not old enough to apply for a concealed weapon permit, but said, “I strongly support laws that allow people who already have a concealed weapon license to be able to do so when they go to school like they do virtually everywhere else.”

Markowitz is a criminal justice student majoring in chemical forensics at San Jose State University. He said he believes university police are doing a fine job preparing students for emergency events similar to those at Virginia Tech or Northern Illinois University.

But past events, he said, have convinced him that if there had been “a law-abiding citizen in the close vicinity of the shooting who was armed with a permitted firearm, they could have taken down the gunman quickly.” Markowitz added, “real life shootouts last seconds, not minutes. It takes minutes for the police to arrive, which would be long after the shootout has ended.”

Ben Dutro, a mechanical engineering student at CSU Chico, said he joined SCCC a month ago because “I believe the entire Bill of Rights is very important and unfortunately the right to defend one’s self has been eroded over the years.”

Dutro has less faith in the CSU system’s measures toward student safety. He characterizes the implementation of e-mail and phone alerts for students as “inadequate” and said university policy “deprives those students that are otherwise qualified from defending themselves.”

But not all students share that hands-on, gun toting approach to personal safety.

University emergency coor-dinators often feel that students or even faculty and staff don’t take safety issues seriously.

When a fire alarm sounds in the Student Services Building, Julie Vaquilar, assistant registrar, said it’s not uncommon to catch attitude from students who don’t want to evacuate before their paperwork is processed.

“They think, ‘Come on, finish my transaction. What’s the big deal?’” Vaquilar said.

CSU’s past and SF State’s future

The CSU system hasn’t been immune from gun violence, experiencing highly visible campus shootings in the past.

In 1976, a custodian at Cal State Fullerton killed seven and wounded two in what became known as the Fullerton Library massacre. Edward Charles Allaway was ruled insane and was confined to Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino, Calif.

In 1996, Frederick Martin Davidson, then a 36-year-old graduate student at San Diego State, was supposed to meet with a panel to defend his engineering master’s thesis. Instead, he produced a handgun he had previously hidden in the room and shot three professors to death. Davidson is serving back-to-back life sentences without parole.

For now, university officials are setting their sights on the future.

Orr-Smith and Gaston stood side by side to observe the campus active shooter drill and seem to know each other’s schedules.

They appear in total agreement about SF State being at the forefront of proactive campus safety measures. But each believes that improvements remain.

“We don’t intend to rest on our laurels,” Gaston said and pointed to future plans to roll out crisis survival training to every individual on campus.

Asked what that would look like, Gaston laughs.

“I can guarantee it’s going to be like nothing this campus has ever seen,” he said. “How does that sound?”