A nonpartisan panel discussion on gun control and gun violence in the United States, called “Guns and America: Joining the Conversation,” will be held in Hendricks Chapel on Tuesday at 6:30 p.m.

The event will feature 2012 alumnus Stephen Barton as the keynote speaker. Barton is the policy and outreach assistant for Mayors Against Illegal Guns in New York City, and a victim of the July 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colo.

A diverse panel of experts on gun control and violence will speak in the first of many events this semester to encourage involvement in the national conversation on guns.

The panel consists of Scott Armstrong, political communications consultant and former New York state lobbyist for the National Rifle Association; Helen Hudson, past president of Mothers Against Gun Violence; James Knoll, director of the Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University; Langston McKinney, retired Syracuse City Court Judge; and Robert Spitzer, chair of the political science department at SUNY-Cortland, according to a Feb. 14 SU News release.

The event will begin with Barton and each panel member giving their opening statements before taking questions from the audience. Questions will be written on cards beforehand or asked from Twitter at any time using the hashtag #SUguntalk.

Grant Reeher, political science professor at Syracuse University and director of the Alan Campbell Public Affairs Institute, will moderate the discussion.

Reeher emphasized this event doesn’t try to draw a line between both sides of the issue, and is instead aimed at exposing students to a variety of different ideas.

“It is not a debate, full stop, end of sentence,” Reeher said. “It is a discussion and a sharing of perspectives.”

Armstrong, one of the panel members, feels it is extremely important to discuss the topic of gun control in this format, since many people are driven by emotion and not rational arguments.

“This arena of policy is not short on opinion, but it is short on education,” Armstrong said. “There are a lot of people that talk about gun issues but really don’t know a lot about firearms.”

Thomas Wolfe, dean of student affairs at SU and the main organizer of the event, said the chancellor asked him to gather a planning group. He said this was because SU was one of many colleges whose president signed an open letter to President Barack Obama, urging him to take action to curb gun violence.

While the letter has a clear message for more gun control, Wolfe emphasized the letter’s additional call for an active, honest discussion on the issue without a specific agenda.

“We call it dialogue,” Wolfe said. “That’s where constructive things happen. That’s where conversations become rich.”

Wolfe said he wanted this first event to act as a starting point for a conversation that will cover a broad range of topics, and that events later this year would focus on more specific areas of the discussion.

“We felt if we narrowed it too much and only made it about policy, or only made it about the law, or only made it about mental health, we wouldn’t engage a broad array of people,” Wolfe said.

Future events, he said, will focus on more specific topics such as mental health, the culture of gun violence, bullying, national policy and a student-run panel on students carrying guns on campus.

Wolfe said he was hoping to organize, with Hudson from the panel, an event downtown on the gun issues the Syracuse community faces. They are also working on an official debate as a part of an ongoing series moderated by Reeher, called “the Campbell Debates.”

Like Reeher, Wolfe said he hopes students come to the event Tuesday ready to join the conversation, which he feels will never end in the United States, but is still important to have.

“I would hope they would come with an open mind. I would hope they would come in the spirit of dialogue,” Wolfe said. “Dialogue is as much listening as it is speaking.”

Published on February 18, 2013 at 11:24 pm

Contact Max: meantonu@syr.edu