The New Yorker:

The first snow of the year often brings students out together. This year, they are being united “in a very different way,” one said.

By Karan Mahajan

To hear about a mass shooting in another city is to feel one is at the periphery of ongoing history; but perversely, to live near the site of a shooting is to feel nothing has changed except that unreality has come closer.

This was my experience on Saturday afternoon, in Providence, when an unidentified man in his twenties or thirties, dressed in black, opened fire in a classroom in the Barus and Holley engineering-and-physics building at Brown, the university where I teach. I was at home, just eight blocks away, at 4:22 p.m., when I received an automated call telling me that there was an active shooter in the vicinity. A text followed:

BrownUAlert: 1st, Urgent: There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering. Lock doors, silence phones and stay stay (sic) hidden until further notice. Remember: RUN, if you are in the affected location, evacuate safely if you can; HIDE, if evacuation is not possible, take cover; FIGHT, as a last resort, take action to protect yourself. Stay tuned for further safety information.

There was something video-game-like, I thought, about the capitalized exhortations to RUN and FIGHT, and I took it in with a curious, possibly deranged, calm. Just the day before, the university had sent an e-mail alert informing us that a “Brown University community member” had been “approached by a male who identified themselves as a Federal agent, displayed a firearm, and used handcuffs to detain the reporting party.” Fortunately, the alert went on, “the reporting party was allowed to leave the location without further incident.” (The federal agent was later revealed to have been a legitimate officer with the fugitive task force.) I assumed that this was a similar incident; perhaps a man with a gun had been seen prowling around campus, and that was all. I was so blasé, in fact, that, ten minutes later, I drove my four-year-old daughter to a friend’s home, in the opposite direction to campus, where she would stay that evening while my wife and I threw a holiday party.

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