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A gunman opened fire inside Constant Hall at Old Dominion University on March 12, leaving one person dead and two Reserve Officers’ Training Corps students critically wounded before other students subdued the attacker. The swift actions of those on campus stopped what could have been a far worse massacre, and ordinary Americans should be thankful for their courage under fire.
Federal agents on the scene said the suspect shouted “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire and has been identified as Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a onetime member of the Army National Guard who previously pleaded guilty in 2016 to attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State. Those are not trivial details — they point to a pattern of radicalization and failure that the nation’s security apparatus must confront head-on.
Let’s be crystal clear: the students who charged in and stopped the shooter deserve our gratitude and our respect. Too often we hear lectures about gun-free zones and “safety” policies that ignore human bravery and the reality that determined attackers exploit soft targets; this incident should end the naive fetish for empty campus policies. Courage and preparedness saved lives today — policymakers should reward and reinforce that, not lecture it away.
The case raises painful questions about the decisions that put this individual back into the community. Authorities report Jalloh was released from federal custody in December 2024 after serving time for the earlier conviction, a fact that ought to make every law-and-order conservative demand answers from prosecutors and parole boards. If someone convicted of providing support to a terror group is walking the streets and can obtain a weapon, then the system has failed the American people.
This is not the time for euphemism or spin. When federal investigators say an attack is being looked at as terrorism, leaders in Washington must stop playing politics and start enforcing the laws we have — tougher restrictions on early release for ideological extremists, stricter controls to keep firearms out of the hands of convicted terrorists, and immediate review of how someone with known terror ties slipped through the cracks. The safety of students and veterans-in-training is not negotiable.
Nor should our response ignore the broader failures of the last several years: porous borders, lenient sentences for national-security threats, and a culture that too often refuses to name Islamist extremism for what it is. Americans can be both proud of courageous students who fought back and furious that preventable policies and bureaucratic softness allowed this risk to exist on our campuses. The Justice Department and Congress should answer for this — not with more lectures, but with real policy fixes.
We grieve for the victims and we pray for their families, but grief alone won’t prevent the next attack. Elected officials, university leaders, and federal prosecutors must be held to account, and every patriotic American should demand concrete action: accountability for early-release decisions, an immediate review of how the suspect accessed a firearm, and meaningful reforms to keep our campuses and communities safe. The bravery shown at Old Dominion deserves a nation that finally gets serious about security.
