No Student Should Wake up Wondering If They’ll Have to Kill a School Shooter Today

Yesterday morning, a radicalized Islamic American citizen and former U.S. soldier by the name of Mohamed Jalloh, a man who had already been convicted of “providing material support” to ISIS and plotting a terror attack in the United States, spending 8 years in prison until his 2024 release, walked into a classroom at Virginia’s Old Dominion University and opened fire. He killed a beloved teacher, army officer and ROTC instructor named Lt. Col. Brandon Shah, a professor of military science who logged hundreds of hours of combat flight time piloting Apache helicopters in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond, earning two Bronze Stars. And he could have killed many more, but for the response of the assembled ROTC students in the classroom. They heroically leapt into action, and did what absolutely no student of any age, background or training should ever have to do: They killed the shooter themselves. By the time police arrived minutes later, it was all over. What was left behind was trauma that will surely stick with those poor students for the rest of their lives, a souvenir of what is perhaps the most fucked-up time there’s ever been to be a young person in America.

“There were students in that room that subdued him and rendered him no longer alive,” said FBI agent Dominique Evans of the bureau’s Norfolk field office, giving what surely must be one of the most gnarly quotes of 2026. “They basically were able to terminate the threat. The brave ROTC members in that room who subdued him, and if not for them, I’m not sure what else he may have done. He was no longer able to conduct any further attack.” Tellingly, Evans also added that the assailant “was not shot.”

No, these students were forced to respond in considerably more grisly fashion, which is a detail conspicuously avoided by some of the mainstream media reporting on the incident, which seems to attempt to hold the idea of this violence far enough away that we’re not forced to picture it. This strikes me as irresponsible to some degree, and something we should confront: A few braver outlets note what local law enforcement sources were reportedly saying: “One of the students stabbed Jalloh,” and an entire group was involved in taking the gunman down. We can only presume that they were forced to kill a man in the middle of their classroom by stabbing him and beating him with their bare hands. It is unbelievably grotesque, but it’s also the reality that students have to face literally any time they set foot in a classroom in this era, something that has been baked into their school experience from the time they were first learning to read. How could Gen. Z end up being anything other than the most anxious generation to ever live? They’ve been prepped their whole lives to anticipate the possibility of mass violence at any moment they enter a public place.

ROTC students “rendered him no longer alive.” www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news…

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— Ryan J. Reilly “paints a vivid and urgent portrait of… disarray” (@ryanjreilly.com) Mar 12, 2026 at 9:09 PM

There is not enough therapy in the world to process this kind of event. The students did what was absolutely necessary in the moment, and should be commended for it, but no amount of drills, or even combat training, can presumably prepare someone for what they went through. I don’t care that they were ROTC, and as a result probably had some kind of combat training–this is not Basic Training, where an infantry soldier is inherently anticipating one day needing to use their skills to kill other human beings. These kids were likely training to become officers or intelligence professionals, removed to at least some degree from the threat of direct combat with an assailant standing right in front of them. A few minutes before all this happened at Old Dominion’s Constant Hall, they were winding down class, preparing for a weeklong spring break. A few minutes later, they’d lost their teacher and taken a life. Those handful of minutes irrevocably change your life.

“Our campus and our community have been truly shaken and forever impacted by this senseless act of violence, and we want to extend our thoughts and prayers to the families and the victims and those that were impacted by this act today,” said university President Brian Hemphill at a news conference.

Now come the obvious questions about why naturalized U.S. citizen Mohamed Jalloh, who was born in 1989 in Sierra Leone, was in the position to be able to both possess deadly weapons and carry out such an attack, considering that the man had previously spent almost a decade behind bars in the U.S. for plotting exactly such an incident of violence. Jalloh, a former U.S. solider himself, was a combat engineer in the Army from 2009-2015, but he reportedly told an FBI source in 2016 that he decided not to reenlist after listening to online lectures from deceased Al-Qaeda leader and “hate preacher” Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011. This is a significant name to invoke: Anwar al-Awlaki’s preaching had also reportedly inspired U.S. Army major and psychiatrist Nidal Hasan’s infamous 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood, which killed 13 people, and the same incident may have inspired Jalloh. In Jalloh’s case, he had grown increasingly radicalized by the mid-2010s and was in contact with ISIS fighters, who referred him to a U.S. contact that ended up being an undercover FBI source. He was arrested and pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, being sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2017. He was ultimately released from federal custody in December of 2024.

This will of course beg the question of why Jalloh was released ahead of schedule, given that he ultimately was still very much a threat. From where did he get his weapons, having just exited a long federal prison stint on charges related to terrorism? Was the FBI not keeping tabs on this man, given that he had previously been deemed a threat? Was it the opinion of the federal government that he was no longer eager to act as a terrorist? Does Donald Trump’s deepening quagmire in the Iran War have something to do with the timing of this? There’s a dearth of desperately needed information here, and although it’s easy to say with hindsight that this man should never have been released, it’s also undeniably accurate in this case. And he sure as fuck shouldn’t have had access to a gun, or ultimately been able to force a classroom full of students to make the hardest choice they’ll hopefully ever have to make.

One thing that is certain, given our political climate and the repugnant normalization of anti-Islamic prejudice and racism, is that this incident will be used as immediate fodder for right wing xenophobia and calls for both retaliatory violence and state-organized discrimination. Some of the most virulently racist members of Congress, like Rep. Any Ogles (TN), who just this week was unabashedly insisting online that “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” was positively gleeful in his subsequent attacks on every member of the Islamic faith, a group that consists of 25% of all the humans on planet Earth. Ogles has spent the last 24 hours on an anti-Islamic hate bender on Twitter, crowing that he is preparing a bill called “The ASSIMILATION Act” that would not only effectively bar the immigration of anyone Muslim, but also presumably strip citizenship from American Muslims–something Ogles constantly dances around and refuses to confirm. But given that he’s posting photos of his own face, with the quote “Paperwork doesn’t magically make you American,” this can only be interpreted as intent to remove citizenship from anyone he perceives as an enemy–a massive violation of the constitutional rights of any U.S. citizen.

The idea that America isn’t for everyone who wants to be an American is something that makes my blood boil. Posting a photo of yourself as a Congressman smiling next to these words is wicked. It’s antithetical to the concept of America.

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— Cooper Lund (@cooperlund.online) Mar 10, 2026 at 11:34 PM

But I digress, drawn into my own quagmire of hopelessness by these cycles of violence and the way that infuriating and tragic incidents like the one at Old Dominion are used to fuel the next wave of bigotry and xenophobia. At the end of the day, it’s the students I’ll always find myself returning to: Regular college kids in Virginia who just wanted to wrap up midterms and enjoy their spring break. Instead, they had to do what I sincerely hope is the worst thing they’ll ever have to do. But they never should have had to. No student should ever have to wake up in America, wondering if this is the day they’ll experience a school shooting, much less be the ones expected to end a school shooting. Is there any burden more American than that?