Reflections on the shooting at Brown

There may be nothing new to say. I guess that's the point.

I was at the playground, pushing my four-year-old son on the swing, when my wife texted me Saturday afternoon. “Are you seeing what’s happening at Brown right now?” Then she sent a screenshot of the Brown University alert: “There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering. Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice. Remember: RUN, if you are in the affected location, evacuate safely if you can; HIDE, if evacuation is not possible, take cover; FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself.”

RUN, HIDE, FIGHT—the best shield we’ve seen fit to provide to our children.

I have an iron rule against letting myself doomscroll when I’m at the playground. But I started scrolling like crazy, in between swing pushes, trying to get a sense of what was happening. In the distance multiple sirens wailed. I saw a post from President Trump: “I have been briefed on the shooting that took place at Brown University in Rhode Island. The FBI is on the scene. The suspect is in custody.” (This tweet is still, somehow, up.) Then another alert from Brown: “Continue to shelter in place. Remain away from Barus & Holley area. Police do not have a suspect in custody and continue to search for suspect(s).” A fire truck roared by.

It occurred to me that maybe we should head home. I wasn’t scared, exactly, but we live less than a mile from Brown, so we were probably included in the shelter in place order? But my four-year-old had been feeling sick earlier and spent the whole day on the couch—he really needed this playground time. So I kept pushing the swing.

There was only one other person at the park, a young woman shooting free-throws on the basketball court. Around the time of Brown’s third alert—“Report of shots fired near Governor street. Continue to shelter in place. Stay clear”—she started walking towards the road. She stopped as she passed us: “Hey, just so you know, there’s a shooting at Brown. My friends are telling me I should get inside.” I thanked her. “Okay, time to go, buddy,” I told my son.

By the time we got home, there were helicopters in the sky. We went inside, made dinner, got the baby and then the kid into bed—we decided not to tell him about what was happening, not tonight—and then sat, scrolling for news, occasionally flagging an update for one another. “They haven’t found him?” “Looks like students are still hiding out in buildings.” “Oof, did you see there’s a kid who survived Parkland, going through it all again?” And the helicopters kept circling, all night long. What use, I wondered, are helicopters for finding a man hiding in a city after sunset?

I went to sleep that night thinking about three things. First, the victims. The students who were killed. The families, the parents, excited for their children to get home for the holidays. What will be the medium by which they learn the life-shattering, never-the-same-afterwards news? And the hundreds of other students who’ve spent the night, hours now, hiding behind desks and under tables, waiting to be evacuated. My own Brown undergrad memories remain so meaningful to me—the big moments, meeting the woman who would become my wife; the little moments, staying up with friends that one night to see a comet, fighting to stay awake until 6 a.m., when the doors would finally open at Louis, the greasy spoon just a block and a half from Barrus & Holley. How will tonight’s trauma deform these young people’s memories of their college years?

Second, I thought about America. The country of that almost-mythological Onion headline, “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.” Where we can muster helicopters and over 400 often heavily-armed law enforcement personnel to respond to a college shooting—where our federal leaders just, days earlier, passed a bipartisan $900 billion “defense” spending bill for Pete Hegseth’s Department of War; where weapons suppliers are making their fortunes outfitting ICE to raid U.S. cities, with $205 million in DHS orders for guns, ammunition, and chemical munitions in a single month—but we can’t make the barest gesture towards prevention beforehand, beyond preemptively teeing up our RUN, HIDE, FIGHT alerts. Where the White House’s official Twitter account still, to this day, displays Trump’s blatantly false announcement about a shooter in custody.

But perhaps my most upsetting feeling that night—sheltering in place, manhunt underway—was tedium. This story has been seen, digested, and repeated with such regularity that it’s now rote. The horrors of American gun violence are so banal that even the observation that they’re banal is boring, and has been for years. For the families of the victims, today is a thunderbolt that might break them forever. For the students and others who spent hours in hiding, the trauma may be lifelong. But for everyone else, this was just the 389th mass shooting in America this year. Tomorrow, or the day after, there will be a new one to overshadow it, just as this tragedy overshadowed its predecessor. Sometimes the process is concurrent, like the shooting at Evergreen High School that was immediately—simultaneously—eclipsed by the shooting of Charlie Kirk. It killed me, thinking about those kids in Colorado, seeing their governor fly their state’s flags at half mast for Kirk, rather than for the nightmare that had just consumed their community. And it kills me that none of the victims from Brown will get even the tiniest fraction of the mandatory mourning—the required moments of silence, the Ezra Klein eulogies, the massive federal government policy response—of that man, who said their deaths were “worth it,” were just the price you pay for freedom.

Christina Paxson, the President of Brown University, said at one of the press briefings after the shooting, “This is a day one hopes never happens. And it has.” At this late stage of our national death drive, that may be the only useful takeaway we can draw from these tragedies: Wherever we are, we hope it never happens in our city, our neighborhood, our school. And, eventually, it will.

---

P.S. That was a bit of a grim way to close. So, on a lighter note: Today was the first snow of the year. Here’s a few pictures from sledding.