A mass shooting late Saturday night at Brown University, one of America’s Ivy League schools, has left at least nine students shot, two of them dead, with several of the wounded in critical condition at a Providence hospital. As of this writing, university officials still have not identified the shooter, released any surveillance footage of him, or offered a description beyond a man dressed in black. What they can tell you, because they wrote it themselves, is that no one on their campus was legally permitted to carry a firearm to defend against him.
That is not incidental to this tragedy. It is the story.
A Campus Engineered for Defenselessness
Brown University’s Weapons and Firearms Policy, effective June 27, 2025 and first surfaced publicly by commentator Dana Loesch, states its purpose plainly: to “provide clear direction regarding the prohibition of Weapons and Firearms at all University locations and events.” The policy does not carve out law-abiding permit holders. It applies, in the university’s own words, to “all individuals on University Property, including but not limited to employees, students, contractors, volunteers, guests, and visitors, regardless of whether they possess a valid permit to carry a firearm or other weapon.”
Read that again. Brown made a deliberate, written decision to disarm every licensed, background-checked, legally permitted adult on its property, with narrow exceptions for law enforcement and credentialed private security. It did this inside a state that already ranks among the most restrictive in the country on firearms, having earned an A- from Giffords, the gun-control advocacy group, on its most recent scorecard. Rhode Island and Brown University both did precisely what the gun-control lobby asks. Neither prevented what happened Saturday night.
Cesare Beccaria Warned Us in 1764
None of this should surprise anyone who has read history, though apparently it surprised Brown’s faculty. The Italian Enlightenment jurist Cesare Beccaria addressed this exact failure mode in On Crimes and Punishments, published in 1764, more than a decade before the United States existed. In Chapter XL, “Of False Ideas of Utility,” Beccaria wrote:
“False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one might drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction… The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes… Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
Thomas Jefferson thought enough of that passage to copy it into his own Commonplace Book. John Adams read Beccaria as well. As I wrote in the Pepperdine Law Review in 2020, Beccaria’s influence on the founding generation runs directly to the Second Amendment itself — this is not an NRA talking point manufactured in the twentieth century. It is an eighteenth-century observation about human behavior, proven correct again on a college campus in Providence.
The Protection the Powerful Never Deny Themselves
Consider who surrounds himself with armed protection: the President, the Vice President, the Pope, the executives of Wall Street’s largest firms. These are not people guessing at what keeps human beings safe. They have access to the best security expertise money can buy, and every one of them has concluded that the presence of an armed protector deters violence. Brown University’s administrators apparently believe their students, faculty, and staff deserve a lesser standard than the one the powerful set for themselves.
It is also worth stating a doctrine that too few students understood before Saturday: the police have no general legal duty to protect any specific individual from a third party’s criminal act. That is not a slogan. It is settled American law. The obligation to protect yourself, in the moment that matters, belongs to you.
What the Parkland Commission Already Told Us
The state of Florida convened a commission after the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting — roughly a year of work, more than a dozen members drawn from law enforcement and education, culminating in a January 2019 report that recommended, by a 13-1 vote, expanding the Coach Aaron Feis Guardian Program to let trained, volunteer staff carry firearms on campus. The commission understood what Brown’s administration has not: when seconds count, police are minutes away, and a policy that leaves defense entirely to a response time measured in minutes is a policy that has already failed the people inside the building.
History also teaches who tends to actually identify these perpetrators. After the Boston Marathon bombing, it was not the massive law-enforcement manhunt that located the surviving Tsarnaev brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev — it was a private citizen who found him hiding in a backyard boat and called it in. The man charged in September’s assassination of Charlie Kirk was not run down by federal agents combing through evidence; he was identified after his own father recognized him and arranged his surrender. I would not be surprised if a civilian tip, not the manhunt now underway in Providence, is what ultimately identifies whoever did this.
Brown University had every opportunity to learn from that record and chose a sign instead. Signs do not stop bullets. Beccaria told us why nearly two hundred and fifty years before Brown’s provost signed off on this policy, and last night, on that campus, he was proven right again.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.