On December 13, 2025, a lone gunman opened fire inside a crowded final-exam review session at Brown University’s engineering building, killing two students and wounding nine more in an attack that shattered a campus already on edge during finals week. The brutality of the attack — nearly 44 rounds fired according to investigators — exposed glaring weaknesses in campus safety that liberals keep pretending aren’t policy problems.
From the start, authorities faced an uphill battle because the shooter covered his face and moved through areas with sparse camera coverage, deliberate choices that made identification harder and raised obvious red flags about intent to remain anonymous. Conservative commentators have been right to point out that the suspect’s tactics — masks, beanies, and careful movement through low-surveillance corridors — look calculated, not accidental, and that this kind of calculated planning should force universities to rethink access control and surveillance.
By December 18 investigators identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown student, whose body was later found in a storage unit in New Hampshire; authorities say he was also responsible for the fatal shooting of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro days later. The quick forensic work tying two recovered guns to the crimes finally gave families answers, even as investigators admitted they still do not understand the motive — a frightening reminder that motive-free slaughter can strike anywhere.
Remarkably, this case was cracked because of the vigilance of ordinary citizens and a Reddit tip that flagged a suspicious rental car — reportedly posted by a man who had encountered the suspect on campus and later came forward to police. That civilian courage — from someone living on the margins who did the right thing — is exactly the sort of civic duty our institutions should be encouraging and protecting, not burying under virtue-signaling bureaucracy.
Yet while a homeless tipster helped save the day, Brown’s response and the sluggish official alerts exposed the predictable liberal playbook: sound, feel-good statements and excuses instead of hard fixes. The university’s decision-making on its emergency siren and the delayed police messaging are not innocent oversights; they are the result of administrators prioritizing optics and litigation concerns over simple, effective security measures that would keep students safe.
This tragedy also reopened the debate about border and visa policies after reports showed the suspect entered the U.S. through the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, prompting a pause in the lottery to reassess vetting. Conservatives arguing for common-sense vetting and robust law-and-order responses are not motivated by fear of immigrants, but by the duty to protect American campuses, families, and communities from preventable violence — and leaders should act on those commonsense priorities now.
