At the University of North Carolina, two shootings 30 years apart show how much has changed

Three decades ago, as a University of North Carolina student, he covered a deadly shooting for the school newspaper. Last month, as a journalism professor at the same school, Ryan Thornburg kept his students safe during a lockdown – after another shooting.

Thornburg, the former student journalist, didn’t even think to call his parents in California about the 1995 shooting until he saw a television news van near the scene. As he said in an interview last week: “That made me go, ‘Oh, my parents might know about this sooner rather than later, I better give them a call.”’Thornburg was a sophomore when law student Wendell Williamson walked down the street firing a semi-automatic rifle on Jan. 26, 1995.

Thornburg hustled some students in from the hallway and locked the doors. At one point, he told them to hide under their desks. Together, they listened to a broadcast of police scanner traffic and watched a local news livestream. Rumours were flying. On one hand, there were no warnings in 1995 to prevent students from stumbling into the line of fire. On the other hand, many knew nothing of the shooting until hours later and thus were spared the fear and panic of lockdown.

She told her father, Mark, about hearing helicopters outside, something he had reported to his own parents when he was a senior at UNC in 1995. But beyond that, their experiences were vastly different. “When I saw it, I viscerally knew that it captured the experience of being in our unique situation, but that it also transcended so many other lockdowns,” he said.This year alone, there have been at least 86 incidents of gunfire on K-12 schools and college campuses, resulting in 27 deaths and 57 injuries, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control research and advocacy group.

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