We Are Helpless to Stop Mass Shootings—and the Right’s Lies About Them |
I was pushing my 4-year-old on the swing at our neighborhood playground in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday, less than a mile from my alma mater, Brown University, when my wife texted me about a mass shooting. I would eventually learn that two people had been killed and many were injured. Three days later, we still don’t know the shooter’s identity, and thus don’t know anything about his motives—but that has not stopped influential right-wing figures, including Elon Musk, from amplifying disinformation that portrays the shooting as a political attack on Republicans. Meanwhile, voices of reason in the center and on the left have appeared helpless to counter this dangerous false narrative, which is further evidence of how badly we are losing the information war.
What we know is that a man dressed in black walked into a classroom in Brown’s Barus & Holley building, just as a study session for Brown’s introductory economics course—the most widely taken course at the university—was wrapping up. The gunman shouted something (students who were present have reported that they don’t know what he said), and then fired more than 40 rounds at the assembled group, injuring nine students and killing two people: Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan who grew up in Virginia, and Ella Cook, a 19-year-old Alabaman who was vice president of the Brown College Republicans. This is more or less all we know.
Right-wingers have filled this void with a baseless narrative that Cook was, as the chairman of the College Republicans put it in a post on X with nearly two million views, “targeted for her conservative beliefs, hunted, and killed in cold blood.” To be clear, there is zero evidence, as of this writing, that Cook was targeted for her conservative beliefs. It’s not impossible, but it’s just as likely—or significantly more likely, considering that most........