At 2:45pm on Wednesday 14th March, I was sitting on the Spanish steps at the Kellogg Global Hub. My noise-cancelling headphones were on and my eyes were stuck on my computer. Suddenly, a friend ran over to me and tapped me on the knee before saying:

“Ameya. There is a gunman on campus and we have to hide inside a classroom. You have to come with me immediately”

I looked up from my laptop to see people running away from the building's central atrium. For the next 30 minutes, I sat silently in a study room with some of my classmates, wondering if the gunman would come our way. Thankfully, we quickly learned that the gunman was not on campus and, eventually, learned that there had been no gunman at all. It was all a hoax. As we were let out of lockdown, a full hour after first being instructed to hide, I reflected on what had been one of the craziest hours of my time in America.

Active shooter situations are terrifying (even if they turn out to be a hoax)

I have always wondered how I would react in an apparent life-or-death situation like this. I now know.

In the second after my friend tapped me on the knee, I felt more scared than I had ever felt in my life. A lot of the fear came from the uncertainty of the situation and not knowing what would happen. At the start, we received no information from Northwestern and were keeping track of the situation by following the Evanston Police twitter. I had also thought that if anything ever happened on campus, Northwestern University police would lock down every building. This didn’t happen.

However, what surprised me even more was that within a minute or two, my fear turned into an incredible sense of calm and peace. I don’t know if this is down to my regular temperament of whether my meditation and stoicism practice over the last 6 months has made me less reactive. Either way, I spent the first part of the lockdown booking logistics for my travel from Morocco to Spain (via car, ferry and train!).

When we were let out of lockdown, I felt all the emotions that I would have expected. I felt emotionally and physically drained and was in a terrible mental state.

People were woefully underprepared for something that is an increasingly normal part of life in America

When I visited my brother a few months ago, I had joked to him about how Northwestern University offered training sessions on what to do in an Active Shooter situation. I told him that I hadn't gone because I thought I would never be in that situation, especially given how safe Evanston is.

I was completely wrong.

But so were many of my colleagues. A professor mentioned that he had no idea what to do and considered running to his car and going home (before deciding to turn the lights off in his office and sit on the floor). A friend of mine who was visiting the health clinic was locked outside, stranded in the open, before a nurse eventually let him in. People just didn't know what to do.

What was most interesting was discussing the event with a classmate who is a veteran. He felt that many of the things that the school did were far from ideal. This included:

• • • people locking themselves into rooms with windows (which provided the shooter with easy access but the people inside with no easy escape)
    • people hiding in stairwells (which provided no easy escape if the shooter came inside)
    • Kellogg staff telling people which rooms to come and hide in (which would tell a potential shooter exactly where to go for maximum carnage, if they were a Kellogg student)
    • people standing close to walls (where bullets can ricochet and kill/injure you – you need to leave a gap between you and the wall)

Given the new paradigm around guns and massacres in America, every major school and university should offer mandatory active shooter training. I know I'll be going the next time the university offers the training.

I couldn’t even comprehend the worst of what could have happened (but now I can)

Another thing that surprised me was how my American friends and the media thought about the situation, relative to me.

Some of my friends (and TV reporters) considered the possibility that the off-campus shooting was a secondary distraction for a major incident on campus. This was not something I had considered.

Some of my friends considered the possibility that someone from Kellogg might be the perpetrator. This was not something I had considered.

My naivety around gun violence was clearly evident. It's sad to see how a population accustomed to gun violence completely changes their mindset about what could happen.

Our incident didn’t even register a blip on the American consciousness

If something similar to this incident had happened in Australia, I’m sure that it would have been front page news. However, word of the hoax active shooter situation didn’t spread. It barely showed up in Chicago news, let alone American news.

It’s quite sad to live in a country where gun violence has been normalized and incidents like this aren’t even considered something significant.

I look forward to the day when having to think about active shooter situations is no longer a part of my life