Why Mass Shootings Haven’t Ushered In a New Age of Gun Control

Josh Blackman, a law professor, and Shelby Baird,
a political scientist, have published an interesting paper
in the Connecticut Law Review on what they call “the
shooting cycle”—the pattern the public reaction seems to follow in
the wake of a widely covered mass shooting. Carefully refraining
from either endorsing or opposing any sort of gun legislation, the
authors help us understand both the misleading media coverage that
such crimes inspire and the trouble that gun control proponents
have had translating public outrage over those crimes into new
laws.

The paper begins by making the point that, contrary to the
impression given by much of the press, mass shootings are very rare
and
have not been happening more frequently. (They do note a recent
increase in “active
shooter events,” which unlike mass shootings need not involve
more than one death, though even those may have peaked in 2010. The
raw numbers in this category are too low to draw any strong
conclusions from them, for reasons Michael Siegel explained
in a similar
context.) Blackman and Baird then examine the various cognitive
biases that lead people to exaggerate some threats while minimizing
others. This section includes a darkly comic quote from the Yale
psychologist and legal scholar Dan Kahan:

In one scene of Michael Moore’s movie Bowling for
Columbine, the “documentary” team rushes to get footage from the
scene of a reported accidental shooting only to discover when they
arrive that television news crews are packing up their gear.
“What’s going on? Did we miss it,” Moore asks, to which one of the
departing TV reporters answers, “no, it was a false alarm—just a
kid who drowned in a pool.” One would suspect Moore of trying to
make a point—that the media’s responsiveness to the public
obsession with gun accidents contributes to the public’s
inattention to the greater risk for children posed by swimming
pools—if the movie itself were not such an obvious example of
exactly this puzzling, and self-reinforcing
distortion.

Then we get to the meat of the article, a close analysis of the
shooting cycle. A widely covered mass murder typically produces a
period of “emotional capture,” which frequently (though not always)
includes greater public support for new gun controls. “Some who in
the past moderately supported stricter gun laws now strongly
support it,” Blackman and Baird explain, “while some who in the
past moderately opposed stricter gun laws will now moderately
support them.” This creates a window in which legislative action is
more likely to succeed. But it’s a small window: The period of
emotional capture is followed by a regression to the mean, in part
because many of those new supporters of gun laws “ask themselves if
the purpose of these legislative moves was to stop the actual crime
that occurred, or to advance a broader agenda they may not be
comfortable with.”

Looking at polling data from the last few shooting cycles,
Blackman and Baird conclude that there isn’t just a regression to
the mean, but that “the mean is in fact declining. In other words,
after each spike subsides, support for gun control is even lower
than it was before the shooting.” They don’t think this pattern is
inevitable, but for now, “Less support for gun control laws after
tragedies is the normal reaction to mass shootings. Not
the other way around.”

This helps explain not just why new federal gun legislation
failed to get traction after the Sandy Hook murders, but why
state-level laws in the last year have been more
likely to loosen than to tighten the rules for gun
ownership.

I differ with Blackman and Baird on a few points here and there,
but their paper is a sharp take on a widely misunderstood
phenomenon. Read the whole thing here.