In the grainy video footage you can make out several dark figures-armed police officers-scrambling outside Norris Hall.

Shots ring out.

Fear and confusion abound.

This video, shot by a student on his cell phone, is the chaotic scene on the campus of Virginia Tech on Monday, where the most recent in a long line of school shootings took place.

This one was the worst in U.S. history: at least 33 are dead, 22 are injured or wounded. Students, professors and staff were all victims.

Schools are supposed to be places of education, aren’t they? How could things have gone so wrong? How could Virginia Tech go from a peaceful rural campus to this bloody nightmare of terror and murder?

The answers to these questions aren’t in yet, and may never be. What we do know is that the alleged shooter, reportedly looking for his girlfriend while dressed in a Boy Scout-like outfit, chained some of the doors shut at the science building and opened fire inside at about 9:15 a.m., killing at least 30 students and staff members before taking his own life. Two hours earlier, a shooter went from dorm room to dorm room in a campus residence hall, killing two.

While police are still investigating whether those two events are connected, one connection is for sure: the horror of the school murders indelibly connects us here in Denver to those in Virginia.

In an eerie correlation, this week marks the eighth anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School. DU students living in Colorado on April 20, 1999 likely remember that day all too well, and as CNN and Fox News anchors report on “yet another senseless tragedy,” and refer to Monday’s killing spree as the “College Columbine,” we must realize that it is time for us to make sense of these school shootings before another Columbine or Virginia Tech happens.

And that’s the challenge that we are now presented with. As immensely tragic and overwhelmingly devastating as Monday’s carnage was, we cannot change what has happened. We can only work to prevent it from ever happening again.

To the many who say that we can’t stop school shootings, I say to you, here and now, that we must take a stand; we must stop school shootings.

And we have to believe that we can. No more submitting to negativity and apathy. No more hopelessness.

Here’s the key: these shootings are preventable. After extensive scrutiny, every one of these shootings has extenuating circumstances that could have been averted. More involved parenting, tighter gun control, more counseling for at-risk students, and, as seen at Virginia Tech, more streamlined school emergency systems could have stopped these shootings before they happened.

While those elements focus more on preventing the shootings themselves, preventing the creation of the killer is a decidedly more complex charge. Many blame the media, violent video games, and society at-large for the influx of schoolyard and campus shooters in recent years. Eight years after Columbine, we can certainly say that those issues had at least something to do with their shooting spree.

But here’s what we can do right now: instead of showing the student cell phone footage on a continuous loop while the network talking heads make conspiracy theories and speculate how many are dead or how many copycats there will be, we need to remember what are media is supposed to do-find the truth and report it.

In this, the information age, people are going to be able to see the grisly images left by the tragedy on the Internet if they want to.

But what this society needs to stop these shootings is context-we need the media to report not just on what is happening, but why it is happening.

If there are potential copycats out there, we can work to prevent them from carrying out their plans. But we must also use the media to investigate and report on all of those extenuating circumstances and details of past shootings so that the truth about past killers is revealed.

While some media outlets paint a picture of these killers as ultimate rebels with whom many troubled youths could identify, which encourages copycats, the truth is really that these individuals most often lead a sad, angry and lonely existence outside of reality, which, when reported correctly, would likely prevent those potential copycats from identifying with murderers and acting like them.

If we are determined enough, we can stop shootings like at Virginia Tech.

The fate of our schools, our nation’s children, our peers and our collective future together relies, at long last, on us ending this tragic phenomenon once and for all.