Upon returning to campus at Northern Illinois University last week, Drew Jeskey, a student who experienced the Feb. 14 school shooting firsthand, said he had been unable to sleep the night before.

“Between midnight and 4 a.m., I must have gone through it in my mind 20 times over,” he told The New York Times. “That first shot was the loudest thing I have ever heard. You wouldn’t believe how loud it was.”

In a sense, the recent string of college shootings is a microcosm for America post-9/11. That same specter of unlooked-for violence that haunts our nation’s airports, landmarks and financial centers now looms large in lecture halls and cafeterias. Terror has breached the Western world’s final frontier of enlightenment, not on a jet plane, but in Geology 104.

To that end, Islamic terrorism and campus rampages elicit parallel arguments in the national dialogue and in college dailies.

In one corner, you’ve got the liberal fatalists, who bemoan certain doom, but hope to forestall it with innovation. No one really expects a national ID card or a fence on the Mexican border to thwart a dirty bomb plot in the subway, at least not any more than they imagine the new emergency text-message alerts will stop a school shooting.

This camp also sees an nonviolent long-term plan as the real solution. For the Democrats, such a plan might involve winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis with pro-Western schools. For universities, it’s providing adequate healthcare facilities.

As the Harvard Crimson editorialized in the Northern Illinois shooting’s aftermath, “Our best defense against random attacks like this one is to make sure that the mental health of the university community is a priority.”

On the other side are warmongering conservatives, who think that with enough firepower, any threat can be derailed. Standing alongside John McCain in his 100-year plan to surge and re-surge in Iraq is Cornell Republicans Chair Ahmed Salem ’08, who hopes to lift the campus ban on carrying a concealed weapon. Presumably, those behind Resolution 17 hope that Billy McMorris ’08 can gun down the deranged shooter before he fires off too many rounds.

What’s interesting in this recent campus debate isn’t the politicization of school shootings, but rather, how two such disparate threats can instill the same fears and divisions.

The differences between Osama Bin Laden and Steven Kazmierczak (the shooter in Northern Illinois) couldn’t be greater.

The threat of Islamic terrorism is an apocalyptic chimera — a dystopian religious monster with quasi-political limbs of international reach. In other words, it’s the sum of all fears.

The threat of Kazmierczak was really nothing but a man — “anything but a monster,” his girlfriend of two years said even after the shooting. Described as “normal” and “unstressed” by friends and family, Kazmierczak was a dean’s list student who had once enlisted in the Army.

For Islamic terrorists, killing others is the ultimate aim. Their accompanying suicide is a necessary sacrifice, and comes secondary to the destruction they inflict. From their point of view, it’s a wholly selfless act.

While for school shooters, death is also generally a foregone conclusion, here the killer’s focus is on himself. The victims in this case are antecedents to the crime, in which the perpetrator dies selfishly among corpses of collateral angst.

Yet the lone campus gunman and the militant Islamist are two sides of the same coin. In their methods and motivations, they’re quite different, but in outcome they’re the same: both produce widespread fear.

Truth be told, there is more today to fear than fear itself. The prospect of another terrorist attack is of course haunting, as is the rise in college shootings: five dead in Illinois, 32 at Virginia Tech, and a lengthy list of campus fatalities behind them. In 1996, a San Diego State graduate student shot the three professors in front of whom he was defending his thesis; in 2002, a former student at the Appalachian School killed a student, a professor, and a dean before being apprehended. The list continues.

“The most destructive element in the human mind is fear,” the journalist Dorothy Thompson once said, for “fear creates aggressiveness.”

Never has that been truer than today. In playing on national fears, the Bush Administration was able to lead our country into two un-winnable wars, destroy international confidence in the country, and damage American credibility across the world. When one diplomat resigned the Foreign Service in protest of American foreign policy, he asked Bush if “oderint dum metuant” — “let them hate as long as they fear” —had truly become our national motto.

Before we too consider adopting such a slogan, let us think seriously about where fear has taken us. When the Student Assembly’s director of elections, Mark Coombs ’08, asks that we take the proposed resolution for carrying weapons “intellectually and seriously,” I suspect that most of us chuckle.

But while it may go without saying that we shouldn’t arm our college campuses, it is worth saying — intellectually and seriously — why.

Rob Fishman is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at rbfishman@cornellsun.com. Agree to Disagree appears Wednesdays.