With the Oak Creek, Wisc., Sikh temple shooting and the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting still fresh in the national media’s head, there has been a strong call-to-action proposed by some advocating stronger gun control laws. And now, having plugged that keyword here, I will not mention “gun control” again.

These events made me notice something different: I have been wrong for a long time in thinking that a mass shooting won’t affect me. I’m worried about just how close I may be when the next one happens.

In February of this year, as you may recall, three students were killed when TJ Lane opened fire at Chardon High School, only two hours northeast of our campus.

I grew up in Wisconsin, completely unfamiliar with Ohio high schools, and didn’t have much of a personal connection to the shooting; however, one of my roommates from freshman year attended Chardon High School.

This was the first time that I was within a single degree of separation with a mass shooting.

Then, on July 20, James Holmes opened fire in theater 9 of the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo., killing 12 and injuring 58 others. When I saw it break on the news and on the Internet, it affected me about as much as any other national headline: not much at all.

I remembered that someone I knew did lived very near to that shooting. Aurora is only about 15 minutes away from former AU student Jacob Bergstrom’s house.

He was actually in Theater 1 at the Century 16—directly adjacent to theater 9—at the same time for the premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.” It was Facebook that told me that he was at that theater multiplex. In fact, it was only about an hour and a half of ticket sales that kept him out of the exact theater where the shooting took place.

After a few hours had passed and the thoughts racing through his head had calmed down, Bergstrom posted a note to Facebook assuring all of his friends that he and his friends were safe and explaining what exactly happened and what he saw.

“I remember being in high school [and] thinking, ‘O.K. if [I’m] here and a shooter comes, where would I go and what would I do??’ because my biggest fear was being helpless with someone shooting all around me. I never once thought [that I] would be in that kind of situation,” he wrote.

This was even the first time that Bergstrom went to that theater, and it was only because other local theaters were sold out that he ended up there.

Seeing that note and imagining the other possible outcomes made it sink in that this really could happen anywhere.

Sixteen days later, it happened again. This time, it wasn’t proximate to someone I knew, it was proximate to me.

On August 5, Wade Michael Page killed six people and himself in a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisc., only 50 minutes from my home. When I was driving down to Ashland on August 6, I came within a mile of the temple.

Here’s the thing, that Sikh temple shooting didn’t have any kind of personal effect upon me. None at all. If it wasn’t plastered on WTMJ 4, the local NBC affiliate station, when I turned the TV on to watch the finals of the men’s Olympic 100m dash, I might have even been able to ignore it all together.

I was actually mildly upset that Channel 4 wasn’t cutting away from the coverage to show the 10-second race.

I don’t know what kind of thing this says about our world, that social media and the Internet have closed the gap between time zones, that we’re more connected than ever, or just that my priorities are out of line and I lack a proper sense of empathy.

What I take from this, however, is that friendships and acquaintanceships are much more powerful than miles could ever be.