Julie Parker, Prince George’s County Police spokeswoman, addresses the media at the scene of Tuesday’s murder-suicide at about 5:40 a.m.

State legislators have been debating gun control legislation for weeks, largely swept up in the gun violence fervor after the tragedy that unfolded at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., where 20 school children died at the hands of a gunman in December.

But this week, the state and this university experienced a tragedy of their own that could further shake the debate over state gun laws.

Early Tuesday morning, Dayvon Maurice Green, a 23-year-old graduate student, opened fire on two of his roommates — both 22-year-old undergraduate students — killing one and wounding another before taking his own life.

“It brings it close to home,” said Del. Ana Sol Gutierrez (D-Montgomery), who introduced gun control legislation two years ago after a shooting in Tucson, Ariz., killed six and severely injured former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.). After Tuesday’s murder-suicide, proponents of stricter gun laws have more fodder to frame the state’s debate.

“Every time there’s an incident where an innocent person is killed by a gun, then it brings to people’s attention that this is something we ought to be talking about,” said state Attorney General Douglas Gansler. “When somebody is killed on a college campus — in particular, the flagship campus, the University of Maryland — it clearly comes to everybody’s attention.”

The debate surrounding gun violence has become a complicated one, as lawmakers argue over the legality of certain guns, the limits on magazine rounds, the procedures for obtaining firearms and mental health and background checks for gun purchasers.

Gov. Martin O’Malley has proposed an omnibus bill that looks to address all of those issues. Among his proposals is banning semiautomatic weapons, changing the limit on rounds in a clip from 20 to 10 and requiring prospective gun owners to submit to digital fingerprinting and obtain a license.

O’Malley hasn’t issued a statement on whether his gun legislation could have helped prevent the recent off-campus event, said spokeswoman Takirra Winfield. The 9 mm handgun Green used was legally purchased and would not have been subject to the bans being discussed in Annapolis.

Regardless, Gutierrez said this kind of tragedy warrants crucial discussions on the issue.

“I think it will be very important for us to look at this case and learn as much as we possibly can,” Gutierrez said. “Maybe the kind of legislation that we’re putting out is not going to address the kind of root causes for these events, but I think we need to pay very close attention to what happened.”

Much of the debate comes down to mental health and how effective the state is in keeping firearms out of the hands of those predisposed to violent behaviors. Green suffered from a mental illness for at least a year and was prescribed medication, police said. Officers declined to specify the illness, but multiple news reports have said Green as schizophrenic.

The illness was a development in the case Del. John Cluster (R-Baltimore County) called a “sticking stone.”

Lawmakers should begin by looking at mental health before going after more prohibitive measures, he said.

“You look at the Newtown shooter; you look at the Aurora, [Colo.] shooter, both of them had mental health issues,” Cluster said. “That alone is probably the No. 1 thing we need to look at before we start taking people’s guns away.”

Cluster was critical of the efforts by O’Malley and pro-gun control lawmakers, as well as the restrictive firearm measures enacted in New York by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. He said they are seizing the moment to hastily pass legislation that doesn’t go after the root causes of mass shootings and instead boosts their political image.

“I see the governor of New York and the governor of Maryland, who have both been talked about as being presidential candidates in the next presidential election,” Cluster said. “They’re both taking tragedies, and they’re both trying to get news media out of tragedies.”

Lawmakers should be looking at the “big picture” rather than chasing restrictive bans, Cluster said. A comprehensive bill would work to consolidate mental health databases to keep firearms out of the wrong hands.

Further developments also revealed Green had a semiautomatic weapon in his possession, which The Washington Post reported was an Uzi. While he didn’t use it in the shooting, the deadliness of the gun worried Gutierrez, who has long advocated legislation to clamp down on deadly weapons.

“How was he able to get an Uzi?” Gutierrez asked.

However, the state still has a number of assault weapons circulating on the streets, and banning them won’t make them go away, Cluster said.

An assault weapons ban ultimately falls on legal gun owners, Cluster added, and not the criminals.

“They’re never going to follow these rules anyway, so you’re putting a whole set of rules in place that are going to go after … the men and women that are legally owning these guns.”

But there needs to be a limit, Gansler said.

“No citizen has the need for an assault weapon any more than they need to have a grenade or a flamethrower or a nuclear bomb,” Gansler said. “There’s clearly a line that could be drawn, and I think it should be drawn on the other side of assault weapons.”

While it has yet to be seen if the off-campus shooting will become a talking point for the gun control lobby, Del. Charles Barkley (D-Montgomery) said it is a part of a gun culture that could tip the scales in the debate toward a substantive bill.

“I think we can pass some sensible gun legislation that still allows people to have their guns,” Barkley said, “but yet maintains civility about everything.”