"Just FYI if you're seeing the news right now, I'm totally safe," a son enrolled at Brown University texted me. "I've been home for a few hours now and wasn't there when stuff started to happen. Seems to be some crazy shooting near brown."

What?! I turned on CNN and saw the quaint streets of Providence's College Hill — lined with front porches — pulsing under emergency lights that washed the cold night sky an eerie red. Nothing like this ever happens around here.

Brown was put in lockdown, and so were those of us living a few blocks away on Providence's East Side.

"Shooter seems to be still at large so lock your doors and turn off the lights," our student wrote. And we did, as apparently did others on our tree-lined street of single-family houses.

It was so odd to see the world's media fixed on this compact city in the tiniest state. Rhode Island has one of the nation's lowest homicide rates. The relatively small number of violent crimes is doubly remarkable in that Rhode Island is largely urban.

Some Brown shooting reports noted that Providence had only two murders this year. They were both across town from College Hill. Having had a home in the East Side police district for over 25 years, I can recall only two murders, and both were domestic killings.

But there were the mayor and police chief and governor — guys that you'd see at Starbucks — dominating national TV. Furthermore, the media regarded their press conferences as so urgent that they broke off commercials.

Americans wherever reporters descend by parachute must also note how often they get minor things wrong. They just don't know the culture.

Several hours after the shooting in a Brown engineering building, which killed two students, a "person of interest" was in police custody and the lockdown quickly lifted. Come late Sunday, the person of interest was deemed not the killer, and the search was back on.

When that POI "from Wisconsin" was identified at a motel in Coventry, a semi-rural old mill town, a reporter noted that it was near the airport, implying that he might be planning to flee. Coventry may be near the airport by Atlanta standards, but not in this village-oriented state. The joke goes: "In Rhode Island, a five-minute drive is a road trip." The Hampton Inn in Coventry is a 15-minute drive from the T.F. Green Airport.

With the perpetrator still at large, the news anchors are hanging in. And the story out of Providence continues to loop alongside the horrific mass shooting of Hanukkah celebrants in Sydney, Australia.

Brown students were sent home early for the holidays, and there was no new lockdown. The gunman is out there somewhere, but Rhode Islanders calculating their risks know that he seemed to target a group of students, not random people on the streets. Sometimes law enforcement takes a while to capture the perpetrator.

Meanwhile, dogs must be walked. Trash must be picked up. Holiday shopping and celebrations must resume, and they are, in low-key ways. Public schools are open, and light traffic has returned to Thayer Street, a strip of pizza joints, cafes and chain stores that serves as Brown's main street.

There have been shelter-in-place orders in bigger places: Austin, San Francisco, Boston. And smaller places: Ledgeview, Wisconsin, and Highlands Ranch, Colorado. They have now arrived in a nothing-terrible-ever-happens place like the East Side of Providence.

And if they come here, they could come to most any city, town or hamlet in the country, or nowadays in the world.

Given the horrendous wave of mass shootings, we are all potential residents of Lockdown, USA.

Follow Froma Harrop on X @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at [email protected]. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Keming Tan at Unsplash