Brown University Shooter Stored Guns in NH for Years

The shooting at Brown University was a rare moment of calamity in the relative calm of high-profile shootings in 2025, but it was enough to make a lot of people very scared and very nervous. Unsurprisingly, we heard the renewed calls for gun control, because some people just can’t help it, but the truth is that nothing much came of the incident, in part because there were still a lot of questions about the guns.

That was muddied after the same gunman killed an MIT professor a couple of days later.

Well, we know one thing for certain: One of the anti-gunners’ favorite policy proposals would have been even less useless than it normally is. There’s no way a waiting period could have stopped jack.

The FBI released its findings Wednesday evening on the mass shooting at Brown University in December, detailing when the gunman, Claudio Neves Valente, 48, stored weapons in the Granite State.

According to officials, [name redacted] began planning the attacks as early as 2022.

The FBI said he transported firearms to a storage unit in Salem in 2022, the same year he rented the unit.

Investigators said he brought two 9 mm Glock pistols he purchased at a pawn shop in Florida in 2020 and 2022.

Former state criminal prosecutor Jesse O’Neill said the premeditation stood out in the FBI’s findings.

“Just to bring the guns into New Hampshire in 2022 that he knew would be used in a plan such as this,” O’Neill said. “That says a lot about just the evil streak that drove this act and what he eventually did. Again, it wasn’t motivated by rage or spur of the moment.”

Say what you want about the guy, but he wasn’t impatient.

Crazy as a bedbug, sure, but not impatient.

And yeah, a three-day waiting period isn’t remotely going to stop someone who is planning an attack in three years. It’s just not going to happen.

Look, this was someone who had great expectations for his life, and he failed to achieve them. Rather than picking himself back up and dusting himself off like most of us would, he just isolated himself and plotted his revenge. And he did it for a while.

Most such killings are anything but spontaneous. For every example that is, there are dozens that aren’t. These are planned, and things like waiting periods just delay the timeline. They don’t do anything else.

This guy bought a couple of handguns, secured 30-round magazines for them–illegal in both states he intended to kill people in–and then waited for years before acting. How do you stop that? How do you combat something like this via legislation?

The short answer is that you can’t.

You can hope he slips up and tells someone something that might make them realize what’s up, and that the person would call the police so they can investigate, but even that has its problems, since people say things that worry others without ever intending to hurt anyone. No one wants the cops investigating them, even if they’ve done nothing wrong, if only because there are too many laws to really be sure you haven’t done anything.

Still, that’s about the only hope, because gun control ain’t gonna cut it.

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