Fear and Loathing in St Louis: Gun Purchase as Backlash to BLM Protests

• In Event: Solidarity and Backlash Effects From Protests

Abstract

Do civil rights protests influence Americans’ gun ownership? Using a combination of survey and media data, as well as a novel dataset of gun-related Bing web searches, we examine the effects of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests on the intent to purchase firearms, ammunition, and visit shooting ranges. We find a clear relationship between exposure to information about BLM protests and firearm purchase. Viewers of conservative media were significantly more likely to increase their gun purchase behavior during the BLM protests than were viewers of centrist or liberal media, a pattern that does not hold for either the 2020 re-opening protests or the post-coronavirus gun purchase spike. Furthermore, county-level gun purchase searches increased on dates when there was a report of at least one BLM protest within the county. Finally, we find that media markets with a greater amount of news coverage describing protestors’ looting and rioting yielded a larger increase in gun purchase searches than those with less coverage. These results suggest that Americans purchase guns as a response to perceived racial threat posed by Black civil rights protests.

Authors

• Masha T Krupenkin, Boston College

• David Rothschild

• Elad Yom Tov, Microsoft Research