John K. Cochran is a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida in Tampa and has written widely on religion and crime.

The Rev. George Clifford is an Episcopal priest and ethicist serving at the Church of the Nativity in Raleigh, N.C. He has blogged about gun control.

James Kelly is associate professor of social work and director of the Grace Ann Geibel Institute for Justice and Social Responsibility at Carlow University, a small Catholic liberal arts school in Pittsburgh.

Michael Boylan is a philosophy professor at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., who has written about ethical perspectives on gun control.

Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Harvard Law School-Brookings Project on Law and Security.

David B. Kopel is an associate policy analyst and expert on firearms issues with the Cato Institute. He has written several books on gun control, including Aiming for Liberty: The Past, Present and Future of Freedom and Self-Defense. Kopel’s personal website includes a page of links about religious writings on self-defense and gun control.

Stephen A. Kent is a sociology professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton and an expert on religions and their views on crime and responses to violence.

Robert P. Jones is president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI. He has written several books, including White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, which won a 2021 American Book Award.

The St. Gabriel Possenti Society, a Catholic group based in Arlington, Va., promotes self-defense through gun ownership and is named after a Catholic seminarian in Italy whose “marksmanship and proficiency with handguns single-handedly saved the village of Isola” from a band of Garibaldi’s nationalist soldiers in 1860. The group claims Possenti as the patron saint of […]