The Debate over Mass Shootings: Anxiety and Public Support for Gun Control

• In Event: Framing and Priming with Political Issues

Abstract

We investigate anxiety about mass shootings as a driver of support for gun control. Extant theory suggests that anxiety may enable people to overcome heuristic thinking, potentially leading to change in policy preferences. Others argue that anxious citizens will favor the side that “owns” the most protective policy in any given domain. We argue that in the guns domain, both parties offer protective solutions but they start with different assumptions about the causes of mass shootings. In this environment, we expect that anxiety contributes to further partisan polarization. We provide evidence from a regression discontinuity design (RDD) on observational data collected just before and after a mass shooting, and from an original survey experiment. The RDD shows that on the day after the mass shooting, support for Democrat-supported gun control measures increased. In the survey experiment, we prime anxiety and find that support for Democrat-supported gun control measures increased but only among Democrats/non-gun owners which suggests that anxiety contributed to polarization.

Authors

• Alexandra Filindra, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Loren Collingwood, UC Riverside