Gouvea was handcuffed on the sidewalk outside of his home and told police he was “using the pellet rifle to hunt rats in the area.” By Jessica Schwalb, The Washington Free BeaconHarvard Law School describes visiting professor Carlos Portugal Gouvea as a “human rights activist” who founded a Brazilian think tank that “led the largest anti-violence campaign in the country, resulting in the enactment of the federal Gun Control Act of 2003.”He’s now on administrative leave from the Ivy League institution after he was arrested for firing a pellet gun near a Massachusetts synagogue on Yom Kippur.Gouvea—who came to Harvard from the University of Sāo Paulo Law School, where he leads the Diversity and Inclusion Committee—fired the pellet gun around 9 p.m. Wednesday outside of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Mass., a short drive from Harvard’s Cambridge campus.More than a dozen police officers descended upon the area and arrested Gouvea, but only after he escaped to his home near the synagogue following a “brief physical struggle.”Gouvea was handcuffed on the sidewalk outside of his home and told police he was “using the pellet rifle to hunt rats in the area.”Law enforcement officials later found a car with a window shattered from a pellet nearby. They determined that Gouvea was not targeting the temple.Gouvea’s native Brazil is home to strict gun control laws—and Gouvea himself has been at the center of political efforts to ensure that’s the case.He is a founding member of Instituto Sou da Paz, a Brazilian think tank that led the charge behind the nation’s 2003 gun control act, one of the most restrictive in its history.The law made it illegal for Brazilians to carry weapons outside of their homes and required them to register with a national database of civilian firearms.When the law was challenged in court shortly after its passage, Gouvea’s think tank submitted an amicus brief defending its constitutionality.Brazil’s supreme court declared the law constitutional in 2007, and its provisions largely remain in effect thanks to Brazil’s left-wing president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who reversed pro-gun policies from his right-wing predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.Lula issued a new gun registration decree on his first day in office, a move Instituto Sou da Paz applauded.“We have a more armed country, a stronger gun culture, more representatives focused on the pro-gun agenda,” the group’s executive director lamented.Though pellet guns are not considered firearms under Brazilian law, civilians are barred from carrying them in public, as Gouvea did outside of the synagogue.A Harvard Law spokesman told the Washington Free Beacon Gouvea is “on administrative leave as the school seeks to learn more about this matter.”In addition to his role as an Instituto Sou da Paz founder, Gouvea serves as CEO of a major Brazilian think tank, the Global Law Institute, that focuses on “environmental and social justice in Brazil.”Its work particularly focuses on “high impact research on indigenous communities,” according to Harvard Law.Gouvea is teaching two courses at Harvard this fall: one called “Sustainable Capitalism” and another on “corruption and inequality.”When he started at the Ivy League university in 2022, he taught a corporate ethics class centering on “the social efforts to increase racial and gender diversity in companies, and the progress and backlash in the fight against corruption.”Gouvea did not respond to a request for comment.The post Harvard law professor placed on leave after firing pellet gun near synagogue during Yom Kippur appeared first on World Israel News.