Penn State officials met in the hours after the Virginia Tech University shootings to review their emergency plans, management coordinator Stephen Abrams said yesterday.

"I've already met with some folks about what we would do," Abrams said. "To be safe, we want to make sure that we're ready."

Penn State's plans are reviewed on a regular basis, but yesterday's review was in response to the Virginia shootings. The group primarily wanted to check if the plans were "up to date," Abrams said. He said he was not sure if changes would be made in response to the shooting.

Abrams said it would difficult to prevent a shooter from coming on campus with a weapon.

"If you have an open campus, unless you're physically checking everyone for weapons, that's almost impossible to do," he said.

Abrams said Penn State's response to a shooting would depend on the specifics of the situation.

"There's not 'one plan fits all,' " he said.

Abrams said officials would try to notify people as quickly as possible so they could take appropriate action. He urged students to sign up for text messages from PSUTXT so that they can get information quickly, even if they are not near other forms of media.

Students can sign up for PSUTXT at newswires.psu.edu, according to Penn State Live.

Penn State President Graham Spanier released a statement about the shooting in an e-mail message yesterday.

"All of us at Penn State are deeply saddened by the terrible tragedy that occurred today at Virginia Tech. Our thoughts and prayers are with those in Blacksburg, and we stand ready to help in any way that we can. We like to think of college campuses as being

refuges from the violence that can plague society, but today's events are a reminder that no one place is immune. On this very sad day, we send our sympathy and condolences to those affected by this senseless tragedy."

Penn State University police referred questions to Penn State's department of public information.

Penn State spokesman Bill Mahon said Penn State does prepare for campus shootings and has a "wonderfully trained" police force. However, he said questions about whether the university could prevent a shooting were "silly."

"They could happen in any community in the country," he said. "We don't have airport-type security to walk onto campus."

Students gathered around televisions across campus, including in the HUB-Robeson Center and West Halls commons, as news broke yesterday.

Brian Josel (senior-electrical engineering) said he heard about the shootings on television and confirmed that people he knew at Virginia Tech were safe. He said the shootings did not make him question his safety on a college campus.

"I haven't seen anything around here that would really scare me," he said, "but you see stuff like this happens -- you start questioning that."

Sean Smith (sophomore-bioengineering) said he was concerned because some of the Virginia Tech shootings occurred in an engineering building and he had some friends who were engineering majors at the school. He said the events had made him more nervous about being in the HUB.

"It's kind of uncomfortable sitting in a big center area of this campus," he said.

A shooting occurred at Penn State 10 years ago, when Penn State student Jillian Robbins used a high-power military rifle to shoot fellow students Melanie Spalla and Nicholas Mensah on the HUB lawn. Spalla died at the scene.

The only other murder on the Penn State campus occurred in 1969, when graduate student Betsy Ruth Aardsma was stabbed to death in Pattee library.