Don’t Fail Brown

The tragedy at Brown University last month is disturbingly familiar — part of a large, uniquely American pattern of gun violence. We cannot continue to let this be our nation’s normal.

It is true that repetition breeds indifference. When news broke of deadly shootings at the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee or at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, for example, I frowned at my phone, then went on with my day. Growing up in the generation of mass shootings, it is easy to become numb to near-constant violence.

But this time was different. On Saturday, December 13, I walked out of a study session in Cabot Science Library and checked the texts I’d ignored all afternoon. The first one I read, from my mother, asked whether my high school friends at Brown were alright. The second, from one of those friends, filled in the blanks: “There is an active shooter at brown rn,” it read. “I’ll update you.”

A few days later, even more upsetting news arrived — one of the dead students, a Virginian named MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, had been a friend to several of my friends.

News trickled in slowly that day. I learned the name of the other dead student — Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama. I heard and passed on an (ultimately unsubstantiated) rumor that more shots had been fired near Keeney Quad, a residence hall home to one of my high school friends and another girl I befriended at a summer camp last year.

Soon after, I found out that the girl’s roommate was among the nine hospitalized in the wake of the shooting.

This time, the violence was personal.

It has been difficult to know what to tell my friends. Campus chatter means Brown students hear about developments before the rest of the world, and there’s only so much comfort words can give the bereaved. People are dead and nothing can bring them back.

On the other hand, for most Americans, this tragedy is one of many. But if fatal gun violence has happened so many times, in so many places, it can happen anywhere. Bullets don’t distinguish between race, religion, or ideology — Cook was a devout Christian and vice president of the campus Republican club; Umurzokov came from a Muslim family that immigrated from Uzbekistan.

Much of the national response, predictably, has been to offer thoughts and prayers and move on. These sentiments aren’t meaningless, but they cannot save a country that refuses to look the mass murder it allows to go on in the eye. God is not a factotum who exists so we can delegate problems and abdicate responsibility.

Admittedly, Harvard has reacted more proactively: the University increased police presence around the Yard and introduced swipe-only access to the Science Center and the Smith Campus Center. Columbia, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania have taken similar steps on their campuses.

These measures, though, sadly serve as little more than a stopgap. Gun violence is a national problem — both Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where the Brown shooter carried out a second fatal attack against a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. Yet, owing in large part to a patchwork of inconsistent state-level regulations, even the most stringent state policies are left to absorb the consequences of national inaction.

In that light, it’s impractical to put the onus of prevention on campuses. Meanwhile, the current administration does nothing but turn a crime that’s also been perpetrated over and over by native-born Americans into a cudgel in its immigration agenda.

Granted, I don’t know how to fix the gun violence epidemic in our country, nor stop the next mass shooting in a school. But to pretend that these aren’t problems that need fixing — or, equally damning, to be outraged fleetingly, then move on — is to fail the dead and injured at Brown University.

So let this tragedy be a wake-up call against indifference. Let us demand our elected officials stop treating mass murder as an unavoidable consequence of the Second Amendment through our leverage at the ballot box. Let us devote our time, energy, and action to solving this crisis, however we can. We cannot keep deferring a united movement against gun violence — reasonable people may disagree on solutions, but disagreement cannot excuse inaction.

Our neighbors and friends may have sincere reasons to oppose new regulations, but let us ask them: imagine it were your friends, your siblings, your parents or children, stuck in a school basement on a shelter-in-place order nearly two weeks before Christmas. Would you shirk the issue then?

Our friends at Brown will recover, and their Main Green will smile again. But it is incumbent upon us to ensure that the circumstances in which they, and so many other students in America, have lived and died do not repeat themselves yet again.

To echo the Brown Daily Herald’s Editorial Board: Ever true.

Michael Isayan ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Apley Court.