In the aftermath of the Brown University shooting, it’s worth reminding certain Phoenix readers of some unfortunate truths.

Rhode Island has some of the nation’s strictest gun laws — including a recent ban on large-capacity magazines, and another coming into effect on semi-automatic weapons — but that did not prevent this shooting. Rhode Island also has one of the lowest rates of gun ownership in the country, but that did not prevent this shooting. Brown University is a “gun-free” zone, but that did not prevent this shooting.

Brown is a miniature surveillance state, boasting over 800 cameras across campus. However, it remains foggy how the shooter got into the Barus & Holley building where he opened fire, and the first footage released of a “person of interest” — by which to identify him — depicts him from behind.

Two survivors of this shooting, Zoe Weissman and Mia Tretta, have survived a previous school shooting. They are making the rounds on cable news, calling for the nationwide adoption of the same proscription and surveillance that failed them at Brown, a leftist-run institution in a leftist-run city.

Leftism will not save us from gun violence. For one thing, its agenda is fraught with too many conflicts of interest. In 2019, progressive Michigan prosecutor Carol Siemon refused to jail one Anthony McRae or ban him from buying firearms, despite felony gun charges, in the name of “race equity.” As you may know, McRae later committed the MSU shooting in 2023.

If the general principle behind gun control were the minimization of harm to others — rather than a neurotic craving to disarm them — then leftists wouldn’t turn a blind eye to other threats. The injury and death currently caused by abortion and immigration can be just as easily avoided by policy changes which leftists nevertheless resist.
Politics is downstream from culture; the solution to gun violence, and to many of our other social ills, won’t originate in the statehouse.

The surest preventative against cruelty is connection. If I value you, if I take a stake in your well-being, if I commit to acting on your best interests, I am, to put it mildly, disinclined to hurt you to get what I want. Without trust and goodwill, we do not have a healthy, functioning society, in which case it doesn’t matter what we ban — guns, knives, trucks or acid — because other people will never feel safe enough for us.

So, it’s worth asking which political party currently poses the greatest obstacles to connection.

I can think of one that forbade groups over a certain number from meeting in public. I can think of one that put masks on young children at a time when they were learning to read and perform facial cues. I can think of one that dumps economic opportunists into cities, who share neither our language, our history, nor our values.

Meanwhile, “thoughts and prayers” alone might not produce measurable change, but not for nothing is tangible human contact called “the sign of peace.”

Zachary Cooper
Bristol
The writer is vice chairman of the Bristol Young Republicans

Posted in East Bay RI on December 19, 2025