John Law (9:48)
Alright, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. Many on the left see the shooting as the latest example of gun violence in America. Others criticize FBI Director Patel for his communications about the event. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch said the shooting is a gutting reminder that no one is safe until we tackle America's gun crisis. The only real difference in this shooting from Uvalde or Leland 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 had toiled until 2am Putting out the Brown Daily Herald, bunch wrote, is a shooting on an Ivy League campus bound to get more media attention than one at an HBCU homecoming, let alone 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. Donald Trump, after honing his uncanny nag for making things worse by posting and unposting 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 who were very badly hurt. No, Mr. President, that is not all you can do, bunch said. 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. In Lawfare, Olivia Maines and Benjamin Witts asked, why can't Kash Patel shut up? At 11:38am Eastern on Dec. 14, Patel tweeted an apparent breakthrough in the case. No breakthrough in the case had taken place, Mains and a reader who might have reasonably thought that phrases like as a result, early this morning and a detained person of interest in a hotel room suggested that FBI spade work had resulted in a dawn assault on a hotel room where the killer was holed up, that the investigation had successfully netted a suspect and that the people of Providence were thus safe, might have missed the fact that the person of interest who had been detained quickly turned out to be a person of only very passing. Interesting. It is not correct to say that the FBI director should always keep his mouth shut with respect to pending investigations. There are times when public safety requires communication from the Bureau's leadership, and yet in an FBI director, discretion is most of the time and in most circumstances the better part of valor. Premature disclosures have civil liberties implications for people who may turn out to be innocent, mains and Wits wrote. Perhaps most importantly, they also have credibility implications because you can only announce so many times that you've caught a suspect in a major case, only to release them before the word of the FBI to the public and to the courts starts being meaningless. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying. Which brings us to what the right is saying. The right pushes back on calls for gun control after the shooting, noting that Rhode island already has strict gun law. Others say the outstanding questions about the shooting are perplexing and concerning. In the Washington Examiner, Peter Laffin wrote, democrats blame guns, not evil for Bondi beach and Brown University shootings the United States and Australia suffered horrific mass shootings over the weekend. Governor Kathy Hochul referenced both tragedies in an ex Post Sunday afternoon while decrying the epidemic of gun violence and marking the Sandy Hook anniversary. Senator Cory Booker also invoked Sandy Hook in response to the Brown shooting, lamenting that we've done far too little to stop these recurring attacks, laffin said. To ascribe fundamental blame to guns or gun laws in either case is deeply disconnected from reality and cynically manipulative. Rhode island consistently ranks among the top states for strict firearm regulations, according to gun control advocacy groups with universal background checks, red flag laws, an assault weapons ban and high capacity magazine limits. Brown University, meanwhile, is a gun free zone, meaning that good guys with guns are unable to intervene in such instances, laffin wrote. The US famously has more guns in circulation than people, including tens of millions of untraceable firearms on the black market. There is no way to ban guns, as progressives like to pretend, or to enact a government buyback program that wouldn't disarm law abiding citizens or while leaving armed criminals with non registered guns. In National Review, Jim Garrity explored the less than reassuring answers in the Brown University shooting. Now, perhaps it's entirely coincidental that the professor of the class targeted was part of the university's program in Judaic studies and has ties to Israel. And perhaps it is also a coincidence that the vice president of the school's College Republicans is among those killed. Perhaps the shooter is just some nut, garrity said. But after the assassination of Charlie Kirk and all the post 10-7- Anti Semitism rampant on college campuses, these are not irrational thoughts about potential motives and why the shooter selected this particular time and place for his rampage. Law enforcement has a difficult job, but at least according to what we're hearing from witnesses, an individual brought either a long gun or a 9 millimeter handgun onto a college campus on Saturday afternoon and at some point slipped on a mask, went on a shooting rampage firing more than 40 rounds, killed two people and injured nine more, was at no point confronted by anyone in law enforcement or campus security, managed to not have his face captured by any surveillance camera, and escaped the scene leaving little or no clue to his identity or motive. Garrity said it is hard to begrudge the communities of Brown University or Providence for feeling less than safe. Alright, that is it for what the left and the right are saying. Which brings us to what the Brown community is saying. Students in the Brown community mourn their classmates and describe the shock they feel. Others say the sense of safety on campus may be permanently shattered. In the Free Press, Victoria Zhang, a Brown student, described the night a shooter came to my as students at Brown, our lives are forever changed. We now find ourselves on a list of schools that grows longer by the day, a list no one wants to be on. I'm used to reading about shootings in the news every single time I pray first for the students and then that my school is not next. I can't pray for that anymore, zhang said. There will be so much to say and do in the aftermath of this day, whether through legislation, self defense classes or better security and vigilance in our communities. But in the meantime, I am endlessly grateful to the police, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, the FBI, Brown President Christina Paxson, and everyone who was just as shell shocked as we were, but who worked nonstop over those dark hours to ensure our safety. In a couple of weeks, students will return to campus. Nothing will be the same. We've lost members of our family. We've lost our sense of safety, of assurance that we can go to school without our lives being put at risk. When we think of certain locations on campus, locations that used to be associated only with happiness, friendship and, yes, occasional stress, we will now think of sirens screaming and terror, zhang wrote. Over time, we will heal. For now, all we can do is stick together. Tonight, at a park in Providence that was originally meant to be a menorah lighting to ring in the first night of Hanukkah will now also be a ceremony to remember the classmates we've lost. In the Providence Journal, Nidhi Bhaskar, a Brown alumna and current Brown medical student, wrote about memories of tranquil days at Brown now shattered. I took my introductory physics course in Barrison, Holly, the scene of Saturday morning's shooting. I spent many evenings cramming in Lecture Hall 166, a place now inseparable in my memory from the shooting that occurred there yesterday, bhaskar said. Before this week, as I continued to live in Providence through my undergraduate years and then chose Brown again for medical school, I described my beloved Providence as the safest place in the world. This city and this campus is not where a senseless tragedy is supposed to happen. I heard from colleagues and mentors at Rhode Island Hospital preparing to receive victims in an emergency department that was already inundated on a Saturday. Saturday night. And like everyone else, I watched and waited as confusion and chaos parlayed into answers and devastating news, bhaskar wrote. And yet it does happen. Over and over again in communities all around the world. Rhode Island's gun laws are among the strongest in the nation, and still violence found its way here. A new law is yet to go into effect banning automatic rifles, but in our nation alone, there have been over 390 mass shootings this year. And that is not something that thoughts and prayers are going to change. Alright, let's head over to Ari for his take.
