On Dec. 13, an active shooter entered Barus and Holley, killing two students and injuring nine others. The shooting sparked debate surrounding gun violence and policy in the weeks following.
The Herald spoke to four scholars who reflected on historical, global and economic factors that contribute to gun violence and how these influences may have played a part in the mass shooting.
Dominic Erdozain P’29, a research fellow at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, offers a historical perspective on the shooting. In an email to The Herald, he pointed to the United States’ gun laws that enable “anyone to convert private rage into public violence.”
“There is a debate about mental health,” Erdozain added. “But it’s an evasion of the real cause: universal access to deadly firepower.”
Kate Birkbeck, a postdoctoral research associate at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs, wrote in an email to The Herald that “access to weapons is at the heart” of why tragedies like these happen.
Birkbeck researches gun violence through the perspective of suppliers, focusing on where the weapons in acts of political violence come from. Looking at gun violence through this perspective — as opposed to the regulation of gun owners and users — has the potential to produce more solutions.
“America has a gun violence problem that is structural, but also the way that our current gun violence problem happened is a product of contingent history that has changed over time,” Birkbeck said.
In an email to The Herald, she added that “masculinity, far right ideology (and) increasing connectedness of online life” may also be factors that contribute to this violence.
“It’s not necessarily that people are evil in and of themselves,” León Castellanos-Jankiewicz, a senior researcher at the Asser Institute for International and European Law in The Hague, said in an interview with The Herald. “Research shows that having access, easy access to weapons … enhances the likelihood that violence will happen,” he explained.
The effects of gun violence extend beyond “physical injuries caused by bullets,” Ieva Jusionyte, a professor of international security and anthropology and the director of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies, wrote in an email to The Herald.
“These ripple effects are not always easy to see, to identify (or) even to acknowledge, but it is important to do that in order to begin healing,” Jusionyte wrote. “I think this is true for us at Brown too.”
Jusionyte researches the impact of state laws and policies on individuals and communities. She is “hesitant” about developing immediate responses or solutions — such as stricter gun laws or better access to mental health — “until we know what exactly went wrong with this person” or what would have been able to “prevent” the shooting.
Rhode Island “has quite strong gun laws and it is one of the states with least gun violence,” Jusionyte wrote. “But that doesn’t mean policies can prevent all such meticulously planned attacks, especially when guns can be so easily brought across state lines.”
In her research, Birkbeck said even places with “good gun regulation” can be affected by guns brought from elsewhere.
The shooting has “re-edified my sense that we can come together (to push) for federal solutions because we understand that this will not be fixed at the state level,” she said. “That’s always been true in history, but it feels more true today,” Birkbeck added.
For Birkbeck, the student-driven collective action on Brown’s campus following the shooting is “really powerful at this time.”
“There’s infrastructure at Brown that we could build out to make powerful lobbying between student demand action and dissenters because … the student body of Brown is so fantastic,” she said.
While fighting for legislative changes in response to the shooting is important, Erdozain noted that communities “need to take a much more holistic approach to the problem.” His research focuses on the evolution of the acceptance of gun violence in the United States.
“You don’t realize how much power you have when you start making cultural choices in your conversation, friendships, how you spend your money, what you subscribe to, what you watch,” he said. “We’re all part of these problems in ways that we don’t recognize.”
Erdozain noted the importance of acknowledging the presence of gun violence. “You have to say that gun violence is caused by guns,” he said.
“We’re failing as a democracy if we can’t protect our places of learning,” Erdozain said. “You don’t want firearms in places of learning.”
