Everyone’s been talking about violence on college campuses recently. We’ve had one racially motivated assault, a fight amongst lacrosse players, and then the Northern Illinois State shooting happened.

We all, of course, feel very sad for the victims, even though some of us think a guy being charged with assault with intent to murder is somehow a victim. The “Daily Collegian” has run front page stories on student safety and every community on campus has held its own workshops on the issue.

But rarely is the question asked: are our children fighting? No, seriously, I mean that. Is our campus actually unsafe? I don’t have the answers, but in light of the recent violent incidents I’d like to try to ask a few relevant questions.

Of course, by pure numbers our campus becomes less safe whenever another violent crime occurs, simply because the number of per capita violent crimes goes up. But does this increase the actual likelihood that a randomly chosen UMass student will become involved in a violent incident?

After all, in the population at large, most violent crimes are committed by people who know the victim personally. One could hypothesize that knowing a violent person predisposes one to victimhood rather than simply living on a “violent” campus.

Violence could happen in, say, Southwest for the same reason parties do: with enough people in one place certain things start to happen in large numbers, even if their rate proportional to the population remains low.

Perhaps Southwest’s or Central’s reputation for parties causes a selection effect in which wilder people deliberately choose to live in Southwest/Central in order to participate in the community culture they’ve heard about. Then wilder people in fun act like wilder people in combat.

Or do violent incidents have a correlation with sports? Arrests were made the night of the Super Bowl, and two of our recent perpetrators came from the lacrosse team.

Sports seem to arouse in people, especially Red Sox fans, a kind of tribal rivalry I haven’t seen since the Israelites vowed to blot out the memory of a hated enemy tribe (whose name I refuse to print since I’m a son of Israel myself) from history forever.

In fact, whether I wake up alive tomorrow after publishing this piece will serve as a neat experiment in the violent tendencies of sports players and fans (don’t tase me, bro).

I have observed that alcohol seems to lead to violence. Half the time the Buzzkill Unit has busted a shindig I’ve been at, it’s been because a couple of morons started a fight about something.

Actually, here I can offer some advice. People: if you are an angry drunk, don’t drink. Seriously, I don’t understand why anyone would make themselves into a violent moron who gets themselves into the police logs and ruins their friends’ fun.

Finally, some people seem to think that because one incident was apparently racially motivated, there are racial issues to confront. Are there? I don’t know, but I think someone ought to ask the ALANA Caucus about it, since they sponsored a recent campus