When news alerts started lighting up my phone on Dec. 13 — Brown University. Mass shooting. Shelter in place. — I wasn’t in Providence, or even in Massachusetts. I was home in New Hampshire, studying for finals, doing the normal things students do at the end of a semester. But the fear hit instantly because this time, it wasn’t a headline from far away. It was two hours down the highway. It was our region. It was students my age.
Brown canceled its finals. Nearby schools shut down. Law enforcement combed through neighborhoods door-to-door. A “person of interest” was detained, then released. And the only thing anyone could say with certainty was the most terrifying sentence possible: We have a murderer out there.
This is what it means to be a college student in 2025. We refresh news pages between study sessions. We memorize evacuation routes the same way we memorize equations. We text our parents “I’m safe” before they even know something has happened. We sit with the sick, familiar dread of knowing this will not be the last time.
Two Brown students are dead. Others are critically injured. Their families are living the nightmare that every parent harbors quietly and every student tries, and fails, not to think about. And yet somewhere in the discourse, a numbness creeps in, as if this is simply the cost of doing life in America right now.
It shouldn’t be.
I grew up in rural New Hampshire. I learned early that communities are supposed to look out for one another, in schools, in churches, at Friday-night basketball games. When something breaks, we show up. We bake casseroles. We pass town warrants. We choose love, even when it’s inconvenient.
But that same instinct is failing us when it comes to gun violence. We keep waiting for someone else to fix it: Congress, state legislatures, federal agencies, judges. Meanwhile, young people — high schoolers, college students, even elementary school kids — are asked to treat ALICE (Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, Evacuate) as just another classroom routine. We absorb trauma as though it is weather.
The shooting at Brown is not a Rhode Island issue. It’s not a campus issue. It’s not a political issue. It is a regional tragedy and a national one. Students in New Hampshire are watching, just like students everywhere: watching the vigils, the interviews, the GoFundMe pages, the families trying to make sense of the senseless. Watching the fear ripple across our campuses and into our homes.
College is supposed to be a place where you grow, question, explore, imagine your future. It should not be a place where you wonder whether you’ll survive it.
We cannot allow this to fade into the cycle of heartbreak, headlines and helplessness. Not when the next shooting is always just one news alert away. Not when families are burying children with unlived futures. Not when an entire generation is growing up with the quiet belief that danger is inevitable, that safety is a privilege, and that nothing will change.
Something has to. And change only happens when communities — including ours — decide that protecting students is not optional.
New Hampshire may feel far from Providence, but proximity isn’t only geographic. We share schools, shared anxieties, shared hopes for our kids. We are linked by the simple truth that no student in New England, or anywhere, should fear walking into their classroom.
I’m writing this because I refuse to become numb. Because the students at Brown deserved so much more. Because every campus deserves safety. Because families deserve certainty their children will come home.
And because this time, it was close. Next time, it could be closer.
We owe our students better than survival mode.
Tess Sumner, a freshman at Harvard studying Government, is a resident of Danbury and graduated Newfound Regional High School in 2025.