Mass shooting at Brown U.: When gun heartbreak comes home

There are roughly 343 million of us in America — a nation where diversity runs from Alaska’s frigid glaciers to the sweaty honky-tonks of Key West, and where the political divides run even deeper. And yet there is one thing that unites all of us.

One day, one way or another, in a land with more firearms than people, gun violence is going to come home.

At about 5:45 p.m. Saturday, after spending an afternoon offline untangling strings of lights and, finally, admiring the glow of a lit Christmas tree, I looked back at my phone and a brief moment of holiday joy in what has been a very rough 2025 vanished into the void. There had been a mass shooting at Brown University, my alma mater.

What unfolded over the next few hours on national TV was both stunning and a numbingly familiar ritual: the news conference where the mayor announces that two students have been killed and nine others seriously wounded; the phone interviews with terrified undergrads locked down in darkened dorm rooms, furniture pushed hard against the door; the grainy video of a male gunman clad in black.

The only real difference from Uvalde or Leland, Miss., was a personal one: Picturing mentally the moments of horror inside the building where college friends like my junior and senior-year roommate and my girlfriend learned to build everything from artificial limbs to nuclear power plants, just blocks from the newsroom where I’d toiled until 2 a.m. putting out the Brown Daily Herald, and the hockey rink where I’d go early with my history book to save seats right behind the penalty box.

As I write this on a snowy and overcast Sunday morning, we still don’t know the names of the two students who were murdered during a finals-week study group inside the Barus and Holley engineering building, let alone the twisted motives of whoever killed them. Yet, to anyone who’s been part of the Brown community, as I’ve been since I studied in Providence from 1977-81, it feels as if relatives have been senselessly taken from us.

That’s because the Brown community is a family — a large, messy one where people fight and bicker all the time (as I myself did back in August, when I ripped the current administration for a compromise with the Trump regime), a trait which tends to make students and alums love it even more. There’s a reason that some folks call Brown “the happy Ivy” — a communal bond that one lunatic with one of as many as 500 million guns in America tried to shatter in a few horrifying minutes.

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But that’s what every mass shooting is, in one way or another: an attack on community, the very essence of being human, committed by one atomized individual who’s lost that connection and who has easy access to a weapon that lets him shatter it for everyone else.

I understand what some of you are thinking. Brown may be a happy place but it is also an elite one, which rejects nearly 95% of the hopeful young people who apply there. Is a shooting on an Ivy League campus bound to get more media attention than one at an HBCU homecoming, let along a working-class community? Sure, but a mass shooting at Brown is also a grim reminder of a cross that we all bear — every class, race, and religion — in a nation that’s jumped onto the wrong track.

Brown University is a messy, happy family, but so was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints near Flint, Mich., where a gunman killed four people in September before setting the place on fire, and so was the birthday party in Stockton, Calif., where three children were gunned down in August, or October’s alumni celebration at a bar on Saint Helena Island, S.C., where four people were senselessly murdered.

No family is safe in the United States as long as we continue to lead the world in manufacturing two things: weapons of mass murder, and the unvarnished rage and alienation that pulls the trigger. Or as long as our so-called leaders pretend there is nothing that can be done, aside from muttering empty prayers as blood dries on a sidewalk.

A mass shooting at an Ivy League university is something that even gets the attention of our president as he shuttles between weekend golf outings. Donald Trump, after honing his uncanny knack for making things worse by posting and un-posting incorrect information on Truth Social, told reporters on a tarmac that “all we can do right now is pray for the victims, and for those that were very badly hurt.”

No, Mr. President, that is not all you can do.

You could, for starters, ask Congress to ban the kinds of assault weapons that aren’t used to hunt deer yet are all too effective at mowing down college students or grade-schoolers — something that actually happened, imperfectly but with positive results, in this country from 1994 until 2004.

But a POTUS who’s very busy micromanaging his obscenity of a new White House ballroom has no time or interest in curbing the uniquely American curse of gun violence. To the contrary, Trump has — nearly 11 months into his second term — taken a series of actions to ensure it’s easier for fugitives or people with severe mental illness to purchase firearms, and for gun buyers to avoid child-safety devices.

That does seem par for the course for our golfing president. Why would a man who wantonly murders people on Caribbean boats and is OK with foreign-aid cuts that have already killed hundreds of thousands of sick or starving children in Africa or Asia get worked up about some inconvenient carnage at a college engineering lab?

Trump’s mini-me, Vice President JD Vance, also weighed in as he always does (as caught by menswear guru and internet sage Derek Guy) after an American mass shooting — with thoughts and prayers and assurance that he is “monitoring” a situation that, by implication, he is helpless to do anything to prevent.

Still, the vice president’s thoughts and prayers for the Brown shooting seemed especially galling since this — unless I’m mistaken — is the very same JD Vance who in 2021, boosting his pro-Trump bona fides, told a right-wing gathering that “universities are the enemy.”

Look, let’s be clear: We have no idea yet who the Brown University shooter is, although a “person of interest” has now been taken into custody. The shooter could be a student angry over a grade or perceived disrespect, or someone with deranged thoughts that don’t neatly fit into our tribal politics. Or, it could be someone who buys into the Trump/Vance hate speech that elite universities are “woke” enemies of the people. Either way, in a better world, a true leader might wake up rethinking his despicable past words toward a community that is deeply suffering.

Looking back on my own experience, I think the reason that Brown is “the happy Ivy” is because — more than its rival schools — the university has since the 1960s walked the walk on the best and truest mission of higher education. That is teaching young people to think for themselves, with a curriculum that encourages engineers to study poetry and poets to study oceanography. It’s what makes Brown great, and what authoritarians like Trump and Vance can’t stand.

There’s never been a Brown alumni president, but if there was — and maybe this is a little boosterism — I’d like to think they’d been taught that it’s wrong to lie to America that there is nothing you can do to curb violence. And that they’d understand that a true leader is the one who builds up our communities, not tear them down.

I mourn today for my Brown family, but until we find the moral courage to do something about gun violence in America, no family can feel safe.

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