BOWLING GREEN, Ky. — At 12:30 p.m. Central Standard Time, Western Kentucky University police sent a text message to students with a simple, but serious message: gunmen were reportedly on parts of the southern edge of campus and shots had been fired.

Four hours later, everything had changed. What was originally thought to be gunmen entering Pearce-Ford Tower, a residence hall, turned out to be a fight outside the building.

Two male students stood outside their dorm throwing a baseball. Another female student jogged through campus. No hint of the panic that locked down campus for two hours was evident. The only trace of such events was located outside the Mass Media Building, where multiple TV stations had parked their satellite trucks, waiting to go live for their newscast.

What started as the next possible campus shooting turned into a mixed reaction by students on Western’s campus; some preferred the aggressive style that Western and Bowling Green Police took — carrying assault rifles and swarming campus, looking for the supposed gunmen. Others thought things were taken too far, too fast.

“They were pointing guns at people and people were throwing their hands up,” said Morgan Walsh, a social work freshman. “It was too much to an extent.”

But when it comes to that type of emergency situation, Brandon Maze, a dietetics freshman, felt that the force applied would have been necessary if the incident had been as big as originally reported.

“I don’t think you can fault them,” Maze said. “Turns out it was just a fight. It needed to be broken up, but I’m not sure the M-16’s were necessary.”

With recent campus shootings fresh in many students’ memories, most notably at Virginia Tech in April 2007, the reaction time of both police departments, as well as two text messages sent to students and a campus lock-down within an hour of the fight, kept many students feeling protected.

“I never really felt in danger,” said Thomas Cameron, a political science sophomore. “Things happen, but I didn’t think anything would happen to me.”

Western’s reaction wasn’t without flaws. Steven Patrick, a broadcast freshman, said he never received any text messages, nor did several of his friends, despite all being signed up for the alert service.

Still, with disaster avoided, students felt like something as severe as a possible campus shooting was too big a situation for a town, and campus, as small as Bowling Green.

“This is Bowling Green, Kentucky,” Cameron said. “I’ve been to Mexico and Wall Street in New York where police carried machine guns to keep order. I’m not sure all that was needed. It shows how serious they took it. Extreme. But you’re better safe than sorry.”

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