The shooting deaths Tuesday of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., did not directly affect most people in Ames, but the tragedy made residents and students think about how such an incident could occur.

Nancy Corbin, assistant director for clinical services at Iowa State’s Student Counseling Service, said an incident of extreme violence such as this can affect those who are not directly connected to the event.

“An event of this magnitude affects most everybody in some way,” she said. “It would be reasonable that anyone who comes in to talk with us might mention it and talk about how they are affected by this event.”

Corbin offered advice to people who were disturbed by what they heard and saw about the incident.

“You would want to seek support from other people and realize that you don’t have to be alone with your fears,” she said. “Those types of feelings are normal.”

At Ames High School, teachers were instructed to talk to students about the killings, said Ames High Principal Chuck Achter.

“We were trying to get students to talk their feelings out,” he said.

Achter said he felt the possibility was high of more incidents occurring in the country similar to that in Littleton.

“Something like this could be a danger at any high school in the United States,” he said. “I think no matter what high school you are at, it’s scary if you’re a high school student, a parent, a teacher or a principal.”

Most of the precautions Ames High takes against violence involve heavily monitoring the school campus, Achter said.

“We have all our doors locked so that you can only get in one door, and we have a door monitor there,” he said. “We also have a parking lot attendant and someone monitoring the halls.”

Achter said Ames High has not experienced any excessive violence recently.

“We’ve nothing out of the ordinary when you have 1,620 teenagers together in one place,” he said.

Many ISU students felt affected by the shootings, especially those from Colorado.

Sherkiya Wedgeworth, freshman in journalism and mass communication from Denver, had a personal connection with the tragedy. Her uncle is the football coach at Columbine High.

“I heard about it on TV, and I was really worried about my family,” she said. “Then I got a call from my parents, and they told me that [my uncle] was all right.”

Wedgeworth, who lived only 30 minutes from Littleton, said she didn’t expect such violence at Columbine High.

“It’s a really nice school,” she said. “I didn’t think anything like that could happen at Columbine High School. It was really surprising.”

Kevin Hughes, senior in business from Colorado Springs, also was astounded by the violence in Littleton.

“It really surprised me because Littleton is not the stereotypical inner-city school where you would expect this to happen. It’s just a normal high school,” he said. “I always figured that Colorado would be a pretty safe place.”

Hughes said seeing a high school he knew about on television gave him an odd feeling.

“It is just kind of weird being here, seeing your home state getting national coverage,” he said. “It’s shocking.”

Students who aren’t from Colorado also were shocked by the event.

“I thought it was pretty nuts because something like that blows your mind,” said Dave Bradbury, undecided sophomore. “Not so long ago I was in [high] school, and I could not imagine that happening in my school.”

One student said he “wasn’t surprised” by the incident because of previous acts of violence in high schools.

“Student violence has become almost a normal thing because of the other shootings that have already happened,” said Justin Geitzenauer, freshman in liberal arts and sciences. “I was surprised by the number of people killed, though — that was terrible.”

However, Bradbury said other recent high school shootings had not numbed him to the murders.

“I was still shocked,” he said. “Anything like that is shocking, for some dude to just go into a school and start shooting people is just unbelievable.”

Bradbury said he feels an incident such as the one in Littleton could happen at any school large enough to have a diverse population.

“I don’t think it could happen in small-town USA, but I do think it can happen at any school where there’s a lot of variety,” he said. “Any time there’s a rejected group of students who don’t fit in and who aren’t treated well, I think it’s a possibility.”