If you believe in gun control, chances are you’ve gotten used to the sense of futility and déjà vu that sets in after a mass shooting like this weekend’s massacre in Orlando, Florida. We mourn. President Obama and other Democrats call for new laws that might help prevent the next killing. Conservatives—probably Donald Trump, these days—claim that a good guy with a gun could have taken out the perpetrator or go on about improving the mental health system (worthy goal, but…). Then, in Washington, nothing happens. We get stasis, until the next spasm of violence.
But that’s not really where the issue ends. While Capitol Hill may be gridlocked on guns—just like most issues—states legislatures are a different, and maybe even more dispiriting, story. Because a recent study suggests that, over the past several decades, mass shootings have actually led states governed by Republicans to loosen gun laws further.
That finding comes from a working paper released last month by Harvard Business School’s Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra, and Christopher Poliquin. Because there is no single authoritative list of mass shootings in the United States, the researchers used a combination of government, academic, and media resources to compile one dating back to 1989. The team then tracked down more than 20,409 gun-related bills proposed in statehouses between 1990 and 2014, and 3,199 enacted pieces of legislation, to see if and how incidents of extreme gun violence influenced lawmakers.
The results suggest that politicians do in fact react to these tragedies. Mass shootings lead to a 15 percent increase in the number of firearms bills introduced in the state where the killings occur, according to the paper. For the average state, that means about 2.5 more bills on gun control in the year after the incident.
Of course, introducing a piece of legislation is cheap; it’s what passed that makes a difference. And that’s where we come to the bad news, at least if you’d prefer to see the United States armed somewhere slightly below its teeth. In states where Republicans run the legislature, the authors find that a mass shooting in the past year correlates with a 75 percent bump in the number of new laws loosening up gun restrictions—presumably because many state legislators truly believe that the way to stop gun violence is more guns. They find no statistically significant effect in states governed by a Democratic or split legislature.
These findings have limitations. Statistically, they’re not super-precise1 (meaning they have large standard errors). The researchers also don’t take into account cases in which states enacted new gun laws after tragedies that occurred elsewhere in the country, which could distort the picture a bit. In the year after Adam Lanza opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, for instance, states all around the country passed 39 laws tightening laws on gun ownership—beefing up background checks, banning high-capacity magazines, making it harder for felons to obtain guns, and more.* Of course, states also passed some 70 laws loosening firearms regulations during that time. But gun-control advocates did have victories.
Still, the results of the paper at least suggests that mass gun violence has often served as an impetus for states to make obtaining, and firing, a gun easier. It’s enough to make gridlock sound appealing.
1 Another not-so-satisfying methodological detail: The authors chose not to include laws in their analysis if their research assistants couldn’t agree on whether they tightened or loosened gun control laws (other options included: simultaneously tightening and loosening, having a neutral effect, or an “uncertain effect”). So some legislation is just excluded.
*Correction, June 14, 2016: This post originally misspelled Newtown, Connecticut.
