OUR VIEW: Not to be taken lightly

When the university announced a bomb threat at the Student Recreation and Wellness Center on Monday afternoon, a few people got worried. But several of them turned to Twitter to crack jokes.

It's fine to joke about something after it happens. But what if the bomb threat was real? What if students and faculty really got hurt? Would we still be laughing?

Sure, memes are fun, and they catch like wildfire. "S--- people say" videos and the Ball State Memes Facebook page are a couple examples, and as we saw on Monday, #BombSoHardUniversity was added to the mix — a slew of funny Tweets about the bomb threat on campus.

Maybe you came from a high school where weekly bomb threats were common. But for the rec center worker, and the graduate student who helped report Monday's incident, the threat was real. Running around the rec center to make sure students were informed and safe was their primary mission.

Then there's the professor who finished his workout instead of panicking, or the professor in the Human Performance Building who continued class instead of freaking out.

You'll see in our page one story we mention a phenomenon called warning fatigue. It's where we hear about threats over and over again and eventually become immune to the issue. Maybe that's what is happening here. Or maybe we just feel safe on campus.

It's easy to makes jokes until it's real. Who's to say the next one won't be carried out?

Just like at Ball State, threats at other colleges around the country are being investigated. At the University of Alabama, Ohio State University and Texas A&M, similar threats have been found to be false.

Each time the threat of a bomb, tornado, earthquake or even hurricane is reported and found to be less than expected, it just makes the next report seem more and more ridiculous. We understand that.

But what if something had actually happened? What if the shooting on Feb. 3, 2012, at the Village Pantry had been laughed at? People wouldn't have taken it seriously and may have put themselves in harm's way.

Tragedy can easily result from any threat. And we're not going to risk it by laughing at unsubstantiated threats.

We enjoy a joke on Twitter just like the next person, but at some point, a line needs to be drawn.