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In one of the more horrific weekends in recent memory, a mass shooting rocked Rhode Island’s Brown University. It hit hard on the campus where we teach and study, Amherst College, located as it is two hours away. Brown is not exactly a sister school of Amherst, but many of the students here have friends there, as do many faculty members. And like Brown, Amherst has an open campus.

Less than 12 hours after the mass shooting at Brown, a terror attack stunned Sydney’s Bondi Beach, targeting Jews. This was another blow to us as Jews at Amherst. Between Bondi Beach and Brown, 17 are dead, and more than 40 wounded. And we are left thinking about what can be done in this country to make it possible for students and faculty not to have to look over their shoulders during classes or final examinations?

We want to be able to teach and learn without the fear that the horror of Bondi Beach or Brown will happen here or on any other campus, to Jews and non-Jews alike. Despite what many are arguing in the wake of these two tragedies, reasonable gun regulations help make classrooms like ours safer.

It’s true that Rhode Island’s gun control laws already are stronger than those of most American states. Sandy Hook Promise says Rhode Island has experienced just two of the country’s over 3,000 mass shootings since 2020 and has America’s fourth-lowest firearm death rate. And Australia’s gun laws are stricter than any in this country.

Surely, we will hear that guns don’t kill, people do. If gun control is so effective, gun rights activists will ask, why did it fail twice this weekend?

That’s the wrong question. We know that even the best policies don’t work perfectly. And in the United States, people can get........

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