The local loon who killed sixty and wounded for life hundreds and hundreds and hundreds six years ago didn’t shut down the place. Most of the killed were tourists at an outdoor concert; maybe if his ultrapowerful weaponry had shredded people strolling residential Henderson, there would have been a bit of an exodus. But big metropolitan areas are incredibly resilient. Look at the slow-mo daily murder/wounding rates in Oakland, Balto, etc. The core of the city of UD‘s birth has indeed lost population, but just outside the city, in bedroom communities, population rates seem steady.
Vegas itself is the sixth most murderous city in the US, and its population booms.
Universities are different. True, current applications at Virginia Tech are up; but it’s been fifteen years since its massacre, and the campus, in the wake of the event, has become one of the most highly secured in the world.
The Va Tech massacre occurred before America began experiencing daily mass murders, before certain locations became notorious carnage hubs. Only a fucking idiot, for example, would wander into a hookah bar late on a weekend anywhere in the States or Canada; and more and more of us know this.
As for universities, most remain insanely open locations – unlocked doors, large milling crowds, young heedless people, a massacrist’s delight. This is why essays about Michigan State this morning have titles like Requiem for the Spartans; people know that at least for awhile that show’s over.
Many students are leaving campus – who knows for how long. Everyone assumes universities are, in Bartlett Giamatti’s words, free and ordered spaces, but the free part begins to bite the dust as every hopelessly insane paranoid in America is issued an arsenal.
