The Effects of Mass Shootings on State Legislation:A New Methodological Approach

• In Event: New Methodological Approaches in State Politics Research

Abstract

Mass shootings have become a perennial crime problem in the United States. While mass shootings have been around for decades, there has been a significant increase in the interest in mass shootings, and associated data, since the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in which 20 pre-school and elementary age children died along with several adults (Levine & McKnight, 2017). Despite this attention, however, there has seemingly been little legislative movement, outside of some token policy passed at the national level addressing issues like the purchase of so-called bump-stocks (Kaste & Lucas, 2018).

Mass shootings, because of the cyclical nature of legislation, can serve as ``focusing events,'' which are events that provide a window during which legislation can be passed. Especially large mass shootings have the ability to bring attention to the issue of legislative areas like gun possession and ownerships, with much discussion by policymakers following such events. As such, the expectation that legislation is affected by mass shootings seems a logical supposition. What the actual response has been, however, remains somewhat unclear.

Specifically, while the legislative response at the national level has been relatively minimal, the response at the state level remains largely unexamined While it seems that several states have increased the levels of control on firearms, there are others that have relaxed restrictions, with some states going so far as to encourage the possession of firearms by teachers in the classroom. This mixed response, coupled with the fact that mass shootings happen at different rates across states, makes understanding the total legislative reaction to mass shootings difficult.

Additionally, while much discussion may follow in the wake of mass shootings, the legislative response is difficult to measure in terms of the legislation that is passed, as much legislation may be introduced by stopped in committee or be defeated on the floor. Thus, examining simply what laws have been made in response to mass shootings is insufficient to understand the complete legislative response within states. This question, what the legislative response has been at the state level, has been addressed within the literature in a limited way by Luca, Malhotra, and Poliquin (2020). Their work focused on mass shootings as defined by the FBI from 1989 to 2014, showing that mass shootings tend to increase the amount of legislation introduced, but that the effect was mitigated by having Democrats in charge of a state legislature. While suggestive, by relying on data that was from (in most cases) prior to 2013 and on the FBI's restrictive definition of ``mass shootings," the conclusions Luca et al. reach may not hold for more current data or a more expansive definition of mass shootings.

In this paper, we overcome both of those issues while using two methodological approaches. We construct a database of all introduced legislation containing the word ``firearm," and apply Hopkins and King (2010)'s methodology to get proportions of firearms legislation introduced per state that restrict gun access, expand it, or have elements of both expansion and restriction. Additionally, using significant sources developed on mass shootings since 2012, we compile a large dataset on mass shootings that relies on a broader definition than the FBI's. We then apply Bayesian structural vector autoregression to examine how mass shootings impact legislation, the type of legislation introduced, while controlling for a variety of factors that can affect legislative response. We do this in the context of Kingdon (1984)’s multiple streams approach (MSA) and Baumgartner et al. (1993)'s Punctuated Equilibrium Theory.

Authors

• Iliyan Iliev, University of Southern Mississippi

• Joshua B Hill, The University of Southern Mississippi