An Evaluation of Mass Shootings
School shootings terrify students and teachers alike. As much effort has gone into assisting faculty, students, and parents identify risks and intervene early before such devastating events unfold. It hasn’t been enough. There have been 31 school shootings by March of 2021. These shootings have occurred across the United States, from California to Virginia. In the wake of the recent shooting in Michigan, the Right and Freedom team consider the best way to think about mass and school shootings with respect to various factors, including gun control laws. What impact would gun laws have on mass and school shootings? The sources for the data are listed below, so if you would like to verify the following analysis, please do.
Supporting Perspective (for Stricter Gun laws)
Proponents of stricter gun laws often cite the assault weapon ban and the downward pressure the ban had on violent gun-related crime. That trend has been demonstrated by numerous sources to be real, so we won’t bother elaborating on that further. Yes, the outright ban had a negative impact on gun violence. Many suggest also that lax gun laws are and gun access are drivers for gun violence. Finally, many who push for stricter gun control measures suggest that the first amendment is often misinterpreted and such controls have become almost impossible to put in place.
Contrary Perspective (against Stricter laws)
The arguments are commonly made that guns are incapable of firing themselves, which is true. Further, there are those who claim that guns aren’t really the problem, but the population density is. Higher population densities create more conflict between people and hence cause more violence, in this argument. Those who are against stricter laws are quite often believers in strong second amendment protection for the individual to own weapons.
Other Considerations
Right and Freedom did a correlation analysis between school shootings, mass shootings, and gun law strength, population density, population, GINI (income inequality), and registered guns. We ran the numbers both unmanipulated and per capita (sort of - created an index similar to per capita). More school shootings within the last year seem to occur in states that have higher populations and more guns. That is, there’s a strong positive correlation (0.736) between mass shootings and increased population. Additionally, there’s a pretty good correlation (0.487) between school shootings and population. These correlations make sense because there are more people (hence more potential shooters). When we adjusted to a per-individual-based index, the correlations went to near zero (so not relevant).
There are correlations that survived the normalization. Gun law strength was weakly correlated (0.126) to school shootings, yet more strongly inversely correlated with mass shootings generally (-0.286). This yields an interesting insight: school shootings are a special breed of mass shootings, different enough to operate independently of each other with regard to the impact of gun laws. Assuming causality (an admittedly dangerous thing, only done here for explanation), if we made stricter gun laws, then school shootings might increase, but mass shootings would go down more. We can’t make causality inferences yet though - that example was only to aid understanding.
With regards to population density, there is a significant correlation (0.842) based on the information we obtained. However, again there is a difference between mass shootings and school shootings. School shootings are barely correlated at all (-0.08) with population density. Like we indicated, two different types of shooting incidents. We also observe that income inequality is moderately correlated with mass shootings, but also seems to have little or no correlation with school shootings — especially when considering a per-capita level.
Without adjusting for per capita, we saw that there was a correlation between the following three attributes of both school shootings and mass shootings: population, income inequality, and the number of weapons registered in the state. In other words, states with higher populations, more guns available, and higher income inequality had more incidents of gun violence.
There’s an important distinction here. More registered guns are independent of actual gun laws. Comparing just these two, there seemed to be little correlation at all (-0.04).
Right and Freedom Perspective
Correlation is not causation, but determining causation is going to require tools that we don’t readily have available. This is part of the problem. For many years, even the study of gun violence was very difficult as there were laws designed to make it more complicated and difficult. So the best we currently have is a correlation, and whether we like it or not, that’s what we have to base our judgment on. From our perspective, we take the usual stance that the law doesn’t matter. Therefore, we spend no time defending the first amendment or attacking it. To do so is to skirt the issue of right, as a law does not determine right, only we, the people, do.
There are two aspects to gun violence: reduce the overall number of school and mass shootings, or reduce the likelihood that a particular person will engage in a school or mass shooting. For the former, there are multiple knobs we can turn. We can reduce income inequality, reduce our overall population, or reduce the total number of guns available. This amounts to reducing the incentive to violence as well as the opportunity. It’s basic math: fewer people, fewer guns, less anxiety, mean less violence. To reduce income inequality means narrowing the range across which incomes are spread, which means turning to a more progressive tax mechanism. With our population-based economy, the potential to convince state or federal leaders to voluntarily reduce the population is non-existent, so realistically, addressing income inequality is the more practical option.
Also, fewer guns mean less opportunity, so the amount of guns is something we should generally try to control. More gun legislation so far has not had a significant impact on the number of guns in a particular state, however, so accomplishing gun reduction will require a significant and consistent messaging campaign more than gun laws, or would require gun laws designed to reduce the total number of guns in circulation. We’ve had successful campaigns before (look at the anti-smoking advertisements), so people can definitely be convinced to give up their weapons without legislation, but that would go against current cultural norms, so the success of such a campaign is dubious without legal support.
For reducing the incidents of mass shootings per capita, we should focus on reducing population density, addressing income inequality, and strengthening gun laws. Stricter gun laws seem to have a negative impact on mass shootings, but the correlation with school shootings seems to go the other direction: stricter gun laws may mean more school shootings (again, assuming causation for the sake of argument). Of course, it could also be that places with more school shootings adopt stricter gun laws. One thing is certain — both higher population density and higher income inequality correlate with higher rates of mass shootings, so these would be good knobs to try out if possible.
Conclusion
Gun laws are tough to talk about. The lack of available information makes coming to a consistent conclusion very difficult, which requires us to imbue meaning onto some things that we probably shouldn’t, like correlation vs. causality. Given that we have no better data yet, and that both mass shootings and school shootings seem to be on the rise, it’s right to do something as opposed to nothing. Since we can’t realistically mass-relocate people to reduce population density or population in states, we are left with addressing some things that are simpler to change. Simpler doesn’t mean easy, however. Addressing income inequality might make a significant difference, but we’d have to be serious about doing it and acknowledge that the fix would take years. Stricter gun laws closing loopholes would also potentially make a dent, but we’d have to be serious about enforcing those laws.
We find the arguments against more regulation to be disingenuous at best. The lack of any real correlation between the strength of gun laws and the number of guns in circulation implies that gun laws are not adversely impacting individuals’ abilities to own weapons. A positive correlation (0.789) between population and gun ownership implies that if anything population contributes to the number of guns more than anything else we examined. Causal or not, more people mean more guns, and stricter gun laws do not mean fewer guns (which for full disclosure, most gun laws are not designed to reduce the overall number of guns in circulation).
And while we try out mitigation strategies, we also need to continue to study gun violence to determine causality. Whatever direction we move in, it will take a long time to pull us back away from the patterns of violence into which we’ve locked ourselves and our children. But there are things we can try now, and the more we learn, the more we can tune our efforts around what is actually impactful.
Note: Excel file with numbers and correlation analysis is attached and can be downloaded here.
US states - ranked by population 2021. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2021, from https://worldpopulationreview.com/states.
Education Week. (2021, December 9). School shootings this year: How many and where. Education Week. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year-how-many-and-where/2021/03.
Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, December 7). List of mass shootings in the United States in 2021. Wikipedia. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2021.
Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, May 13). List of U.S. states by population density. Wikipedia. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population_density.
Kwon, R., & Cabrera, J. F. (2019, September 20). Income inequality and mass shootings in the United States - BMC Public Health. BioMed Central. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-7490-x.
April 17, 2021. (2021, July 31). Latest gun ownership stats: Trends can't lie, people can. Hunting Mark. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from https://huntingmark.com/gun-ownership-stats/.
