On December 13, 2025, a lone gunman stalked into Brown University’s Barus and Holley engineering building during finals and opened fire, leaving two students dead and nine more wounded in a campus that should have been a place of learning and safety. The scene of chaotic escape and terror is a brutal reminder that no elite institution is immune to the bloodshed sweeping our country, and officials must answer why a university so wealthy and connected was so vulnerable.
The response from authorities has been muddled at best and negligent at worst: after a massive manhunt, a person was detained overnight only to be released when ballistics and evidence failed to link him to the crime. This public whiplash — a midnight raid, a headline arrest, then a humiliating reversal — erodes trust and wastes precious time while the killer remains at large.
Brown’s administration and Providence leaders scrambled to lockdown campus, cancel exams, and console a grieving community, but words and vigils are not protection; action is. Two students were killed, including one active in campus politics, and several victims are in critical condition — these are not just statistics to be framed into a predictable debate about policy that often forgets victims.
Predictably, prominent voices rushed to use the tragedy for an immediate push toward sweeping gun control, ignoring the immediate failures in security, communication, and investigative rigor that allowed this suspect to slip back into the public. Conservatives want solutions that actually prevent violence: empowered and properly funded campus security, better coordination between local and federal law enforcement, and uncompromising criminal penalties for perpetrators — not virtue signaling from elected officials.
Americans who pay the bills for these institutions deserve accountability, not apologies that come only after headlines force it. Law enforcement should be resourced and held to a high standard; university leaders should review door locks, surveillance, and emergency protocols immediately; and the political class should stop weaponizing tragedy for headlines while failing to keep students safe. The families and classmates of the victims deserve swift justice and a promise that our campuses will never again be treated as soft targets.
