I don't know a lot more than you do about the shooting at Brown, but I'll tell you the little I do know, and it leaves me very puzzled. I haven't been in the particular lecture hall where the shooting happened, but it's undoubtedly like the ones I have taught in. The room is two stories high, extending through the basement and the first floor. It's a steeply sloping amphitheater. The instructor stands in the pit at the bottom behind a podium with a computer that controls a projector in the top and back of the room, and uses a lapel mic. There is a single entrance at the bottom which is normally how the instructor comes in, and two sets of double doors at the top, on either side of the projection booth, through which the students enter. Usually, as in this case, they are right next to a door to the street. The capacity of these rooms is about 150, sometimes more. Nobody ever sits in the front row.
The event was not a lecture that would be on the syllabus, but rather a final exam review session led by a senior undergraduate teaching assistant. The professor -- the course instructor -- was not present. These sessions are not scheduled until late in the semester, and obviously this was not during a regular class time because it was on a Saturday. Attendance is entirely optional. The time and place is only announced in the last week or so of classes and only disseminated to students who are enrolled in the course. There isn't any public schedule posted of these sessions, they're ad hoc.
Put this all together and it is completely implausible that the shooter was targeting any individual. Unless he was enrolled in the course, or knew someone who was, he would not even have known where and when this was happening, and even if he did, he would not have known where the person was sitting. Believe me, trying to find a particular person in a lecture hall with 100 or more people depends on luck. Doing it from behind would be even harder. If he was shooting at the TA, he missed. For the reasons given above, it's even quite unlikely that he was targeting this particular course.
According to earwitnesses who talked to reporters, the shooter fired two volleys, probably of 12 rounds each, which just means he emptied a magazine and then reloaded. According to the Providence police chief*, he used a 9mm handgun. That he fired 24 rounds and only hit 9 people doesn't necessarily mean he's a bad shot. People would immediately have ducked behind their seats and he wouldn't have had a shot at many people, except maybe in the top row where he had a side view.
So it appears that his real target was the university. If that's the case, he definitely succeeded. People are generally traumatized, the community is in shock, and the educational mission of the university has been significantly disrupted. I know that equally bad or even worse violence happens somewhere in the U.S. almost every day, and the immense attention given to this event may seem disproportionate. Maybe it is, but the impact goes beyond street or family violence because it affects so many more people and in more complex ways. That at least two students who were in the vicinity were victims of school shootings previously tells you something about this country that we don't seem to want to hear.
*Who happens to be an immigrant from a shithole country. Maybe the president will have him denaturalized and deported.
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