Among a long list of issues facing the American public, guns are third only to gay marriage and abortion in terms of people who report that they are ‘‘not willing to listen to the other side.’’
In concert with this cultural rift, scholarly discussion over guns has been similarly contentious. Although scholars and the public agree that the roughly 100000 shootings each year in the United States are a clear threat to health, uncertainty remains as to whether civilians armed with guns are, on average, protecting or endangering themselves from such shootings. Several case–control studies have explored the relationship between homicide and having a gun in the home, purchasing a gun, or owning a gun. These prior studies were not designed to determine the risk or protection that possession of a gun might create for an individual at the time of a shooting and have only considered fatal outcomes. This led a recent National Research Council committee to conclude that, although the observed associations in these case–control studies may be of interest, they do little to reveal the impact of guns on homicide or the utility of guns for self-defense. However, the recent National Research Council committee also concluded that additional individual-level studies of the association between gun ownership and violence were the
most important priority for the future. With this in mind, we conducted a population-based
case–control study in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to investigate the relationship between being
injured with a gun in an assault and an individual’s possession of a gun at the time. We included
both fatal and nonfatal outcomes and accounted for a variety of individual and situational confounders also measured at the time of assault.
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What Are the Most Effective Policies in Reducing Gun Homicides?
The public mass shootings in Newtown, Charleston, Orlando, Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Pittsburgh, and, especially, Parkland have brought the issue of firearm violence to the forefront. These tragedies have sparked a national debate about federal and state policies to reduce firearm violence. State policymakers are grappling to identify solutions by considering multiple legislative proposals, from red flag laws to universal background checks to bans on assault weapons to stricter regulation of semiautomatic weapons. Some states are considering laws that make it easier to carry and use firearms in public. Still others are debating laws aimed at eradicating gun culture, by — for example — banning all gun-related activities (such as shooting clubs or trainings) at public high schools. With a myriad of often conflicting ideas and proposals, where does a state policymaker begin?
This policy brief will help state policymakers navigate the scientific evidence regarding the impact of state firearm laws on gun-related homicide. Taking advantage of new data resulting from a research project at the Boston University School of Public Health and with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Evidence for Action Program,[1] we developed a comprehensive database of state firearm laws spanning the period 1991-2016. We then examined the impact of a range of state firearm laws on total, firearm-related, and nonfirearm-related homicide rates at the state level during this time period. The State Firearm Laws Database is publicly available at www.statefirearmlaws.org.
Our analysis found three priority pieces of legislation that would have the greatest impact in reducing overall firearm homicide rates:
Universal background checks.
+ Prohibition of gun possession by people with a history of any violent misdemeanor, threatened violence, serious alcohol-related crime, or subject to a domestic violence restraining order. This must be accompanied by: (1) a requirement that firearms already in their possession be surrendered; (2) a procedure for confiscating guns if they are not relinquished voluntarily; and (3) procedures for confiscating guns in situations where a person becomes prohibited from owning firearms after having passed an earlier background check.
+ Laws that give discretion to law enforcement officials (“may issue” laws) in denying concealed carry permits to those who are at high risk for violence, especially those who have a criminal history of violence.
The purpose of this research was not simply to identify a list of laws that “work” and laws that “do not work.” The advantage of this research is that it allowed us to compare the impact of multiple laws at the same time, enabling us to obtain a sense of what laws appear to be most strongly associated with lower rates of firearm homicide. Ultimately, our goal was to identify the types of laws that appear to have the greatest impact and which should therefore be a priority for policymakers.
Lockdown Drills: A Widely Used Yet Often Misunderstood Practice
The May 24, 2022, mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, where 19 fourth grade students and two of their teachers were killed and 17 others were injured, reignited a national discourse about preparing school communities for similar tragedies. Proposals ranging from armed teachers to clear backpacks were circulated, despite the lack of empirical evidence to support their efficacy in situations like Uvalde. This leaves an important question for stakeholders charged with keeping school communities safe: what is the best way to reduce the harm caused by these events that is evidence-based?
One strategy that has received considerable attention in the aftermath of these tragedies are lockdown drills, which are currently used in more than 95 percent of public K-12 schools in the US each year. These practices became commonplace after the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, CO. Even without a formal intruder protocol, hundreds of students and teachers engaged in the act of locking down during the shooting, an action that the Columbine Review Commission credited with saving countless lives. Although the perpetrators had an unprecedented 50 minutes that they were in control of the school and were armed with four firearms and nearly 100 improvised explosive devices, they never attempted to breach a locked door.
Despite the widespread use of lockdown drills in US schools, the conversation about their efficacy remains contentious and often is not guided by empirical evidence. This brief provides an overview of the scholarly evidence surrounding lockdown drills, as well as considerations of best practices, an important foundation for policymakers tasked with keeping students and staff safe and for the public to better understand their utility in schools.
Overview of The American School Shooting Study
Although rare events, school shootings remain a pressing public policy issue in America. Importantly, available data show a modest upward trend in multiple-casualty school shootings. Few crimes are as shocking as the recent mass shooting attack at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, in which 19 students and two teachers were murdered. These high-profile events have led to heated debates about gun control, gun rights, mental health, and privacy rights.
Surveys suggest that Americans today tend to view schools as unsafe, and public fear over school violence has deepened. Indeed, the adverse costs of school shootings go well-beyond the terrible loss of life and grief of the families and communities immediately impacted. The effects reverberate throughout the nation. Not only are teachers and schoolchildren directly exposed, but parents, police, first responders, nurses, surgeons, pastors, counselors, and custodians, to name a few, are also vicariously affected. In the wake of traumatic attacks, schools struggle to cope, and surviving students’ school performance may suffer.
Although research on school shootings has increased recently, much of the literature is inconsistent, primarily due to variations in datasets and school shooting definitions. Most studies employ small nonprobability rather than randomly selected samples of US school shooters or prioritize mass shootings and lethal gun violence. By contrast, the limited quantitative studies tend to be more inclusive by studying fatal and nonfatal gun assaults. Even here, there are disparities in inclusion criteria, as some studies examine school-associated violence that transpires both on and off campus property.
While extensive data have documented school crimes more broadly, there is far less information on school shootings. For instance, the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey’s (NCVS) School Crime Supplement provides homicide numbers but exclude precise statistics on school shootings. This lack of consistent, national-level data has hindered the development of systematic research, limiting our capacity to create and implement public policy that is directed toward reducing school shootings and is rooted in rigorous social science. Accordingly, we created a national-level database using open-source information to examine school shootings in the United States and provide stakeholders with the information they need to develop meaningful policies.
Can Mass Shootings be Stopped?
Over the last two years, there have been a number of high-profile mass public shootings in the United States that have dominated the headlines and captured the attention of the public and policymakers alike—from Buffalo, New York (May 14, 2022; 10 dead) to Uvalde, Texas (May 24, 2022; 21 dead), Highland Park, Illinois (July 4, 2022; 7 dead), Monterrey Park, California (January 21, 2023; 11 dead), and Louisville, Kentucky (April 10, 2023; 5 dead). Although mass public shootings rarely made headlines during the height of the pandemic, the frequency of events has since rebounded to pre-COVID levels. Consequently, these and other mass public shootings have reinforced the need to do more to prevent these tragedies from occurring and to mitigate the harms to individuals and communities if and when they happen. To achieve these goals, it is important to understand the trends associated with the phenomenon of mass public shootings.
The Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium (the Consortium) first published a report in 2018 analyzing 51 years (1966–2016) of mass public shootings data. In order to better understand the phenomenon of mass shootings, the report presented information on the location of shootings, weapons used, and demographics of the perpetrators. A follow-up report released in 2021 integrated an additional four years of data (2017–20). These reports were based on a comprehensive database of US mass public shootings from researchers Jaclyn Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass.
As the United States continues to face record rates of gun violence, with mass public shootings also increasing in frequency, the need for evidence-based policies is all the more important. A starting point, however, is understanding the different contexts and characteristics of various forms of firearm violence. Mass public shootings, although among the rarest forms of gun violence, require different strategies for prevention and response from other incidents. These shootings often involve considerable planning, which can provide important opportunities for identification, intervention, and de-escalation of the threat before it is carried out, unlike other forms of more spontaneous gun violence. Additionally, mass public shootings often are random in nature and occur in large, open public spaces, which present different challenges—including preventative security measures and law enforcement responses—from targeted incidents and those that occur in private locations.
Taken together, understanding the unique context of the mass public shootings phenomenon is necessary for policymakers, practitioners, and other vested stakeholders to work to reduce these incidents and their impacts. This updated report includes two additional years of data and identifies changes in trends related to mass shootings, particularly as Americans resumed activities like work and school outside of the home amid the rollout of the COVID vaccine. Specifically, this brief presents analyses of a total of 57 years of mass shootings data (1966–2022). The analyses include the frequency of events, fatalities and injuries, distribution of location types, patterns of weapon usage, and perpetrators’ demographic characteristics. The appendix reports the findings for only the two most recent years of data and compares them to the patterns for the previous 55 years.
Local Exposure to School Shootings and Youth Antidepressant Use
While over 240,000 American students experienced a school shooting in the last two decades, little is known about the impacts of these events on the mental health of surviving youth. Using large-scale prescription data from 2006 to 2015, we examine the effects of 44 school shootings on youth antidepressant use in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that local exposure to fatal school shootings increases youth antidepressant use by 21.4 percent in the following two years. These effects are smaller in areas with a higher density of mental health providers who focus on behavioral, rather than pharmacological, interventions.
The Costs of Gun Violence and How Gun Violence Survivors Navigate Those Costs
Gun violence is an immeasurable tragedy that entails bewildering financial hardships. Scholars estimate that gun violence costs the US as much as $557 billion each year—that’s over $1,600 per American per year. Americans don’t directly pay that cost—there isn’t a “gun violence” line item on your annual tax forms to pay a share of the related hospital and counseling bills, the lifetime of lost productivity, the costs associated with the criminal justice system, and other financial burdens that gun violence entails. A great deal of this collective cost is absorbed by employers, the healthcare system and insurance companies, and the criminal justice system, and then passed down to many Americans in the form of fewer benefits, larger premiums, and higher taxes.
But much of it isn’t. Gun violence survivors—those who are navigating one of the most traumatic experiences they will endure—often have to figure out on their own how to shoulder the immediate financial fallout of gun violence. This includes: paying for a funeral no one budgets for; keeping up with expenses once covered by a now-injured or deceased family member, from basic living expenses to college funds for now-orphaned children; covering months, if not years, of therapy for aggrieved loved ones; and even figuring out how to make it through the workday under the weight of trauma, bereavement, and grief. The costs can be crushing, especially for the most vulnerable survivors who may find themselves scrambling just to make it through the immediate aftermath of gun violence. The racial disparities are stark, with gun violence often concentrated in communities already disproportionately bearing the brunt of poverty and marginalization. According to 2020 CDC data, Black Americans were over 12 times as likely to be murdered by gun violence as compared to white Americans, Hispanic (twice as likely), and indigenous people (over 3.5 times as likely) were also disparately represented among the 19,000 murdered that year by gun violence.
Even victim’s compensation programs—applauded as a means of putting victims at the center of crime response—often require survivors to wade through a confusing, and sometimes demoralizing, process only to receive fewer funds than requested or even outright denial. Indeed, one investigative report found that fewer than 40 percent of Illinois gun violence survivors who applied for victim’s compensation actually received it. But what’s worse is that the same report found that only 1 in 50 eligible gun violence victims even applied in the first place—likely because they didn’t know they were eligible or found the application process all too cumbersome.
The costs can be crushing, especially for the most vulnerable survivors who may find themselves scrambling just to make it through the immediate aftermath of gun violence.
Consequently, many people turn to crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe, where at least at the onset, the barriers to setting up a campaign to support gun violence survivors seem far lower than pursuing other kinds of support. Gun violence survivors aren’t alone in turning to the crowdfunding site: since GoFundMe’s founding in 2010, over $15 billion has been raised for people campaigning for causes as diverse as vet bills, college tuition, and tattoo removal. In the absence of accessible and adequate public resources, as with victims’ compensation funds, it’s no wonder that well over 100 million people have campaigned and donated on the site. But not all campaigns fare equally. Our forthcoming study, coauthored with Catherine Burgess, in the August 2024 issue of Gender & Society examines GoFundMe campaigns started to support those impacted by gun homicides of women and girls.
Our study aims to understand how the politics of victimhood impact the financial ramifications of gun violence, as survivors turn to private help amid inadequate public support. Perhaps because boys and men are more likely to be victims of gun violence, far less attention has been focused on women and girls as gun violence victims and how both gender and race shape how survivors are both understood and are able to cope in the aftermath. We looked at two states—California and Florida—using the National Gun Violence Memorial Project to identify murdered women and girls, whose names we then searched in GoFundMe to locate campaigns. Focusing on 2016–18, our sample included 127 active campaigns on behalf of people—primarily family members but sometimes friends or witnesses—impacted by gun homicides involving women or girls. This allowed us to trace disparities across different kinds of gun violence and varying demographics of victims and survivors. Specifically, we were interested in whether or not a campaign was started, which kinds of support were asked for, and how campaign organizers framed gun violence and the victims and survivors it impacted.
Among the campaigns we analyzed that were started in response to women and girls murdered in Florida and California from 2016 to 2018, we found that people turned to GoFundMe for support at a relatively consistent rate regardless of race as compared to their representation among female gun murder victims (35 percent of campaigns were on behalf of white women and girls versus 37 percent white women and girls among female murder victims; 23 percent versus 24 percent for Black Americans; 29 percent versus 34 percent Latinx). However, we found that campaigns on behalf of white women and girls garnered six times more funds than campaigns for Black women and girls, and three times more funds than campaigns for Latinx women and girls—the average campaign for white women and girls received over $33,000 as compared to $5,457 for Black women and girls and $10,178 for Latinx women and girls.
Analyzing the text of these campaigns, we found a great deal of variation in how people framed their campaigns and, ultimately, how the problem of gun violence was differently constructed as people justified the often awkward, and sometimes downright stigmatizing, act of asking for money. Sociologists Erik Schneiderhan and Martin Lukk discuss in their book GoFailMe that campaigns may convey need, but the extent to which they successfully do so is dependent on the ability of campaigners to tap into dominant discourses surrounding worthiness and charitability, alongside a willingness to divulge personal and often uncomfortable, embarrassing, or traumatizing details about an already difficult situation. Likewise, we found stark differences in how gun violence was framed: campaigns for people impacted by mass shootings were most able to tap into narratives of gun violence that framed victims as innocent, while victims of community gun violence and domestic gun violence often downplayed or even omitted mention of gun violence altogether. Further, campaigns for mass shooting victims disproportionately involved white women and girls, effectively rendering white victims as more visible—and grieve-able—as compared to women and girls of color, even though the latter disproportionately experience gun violence.
Our qualitative analysis also showed stark racial differences in the kinds of restitution campaigns solicited. Campaigns for women and girls of color were more likely to ask for funds to cover immediate expenses, like funerals and medical expenses. In contrast, campaigns for white women and girls generally did not solicit funding for medical expenses and asked for funeral expense support less often. Instead, these campaigns disproportionately asked for support that memorialized victims through charity and, more rarely, gun violence prevention and political action—a difference that not only reflected material inequalities among gun violence survivors but also reinforced divergent constructions of gun violence as a social problem. GoFundMe campaigners navigated the discomfort of asking for money for one of the most tragic experiences a family can face through the available cultural narratives for asserting victims as worthy of compassion and support. As they did so, they confronted the weight of disparate constructions of gun violence as a social problem: as public grief (for white victims) or private trouble (for victims of color), a framework we develop in our study by critically expanding the concept of the “sociological imagination” to the issue of gun violence. The vast disparities in funding outcomes we observed both reflected and reinforced this bifurcation.
Private channels of support for financial resources, like GoFundMe, may be appealing in the face of cumbersome, inadequate, and even unresponsive public support systems.
Gun violence is, however, a public problem, a fact that can get distorted not just by the disparate media coverage of gun violence, including mass shootings, but also by the options available to survivors to seek out support in its aftermath. Private channels of support for financial resources, like GoFundMe, may be appealing in the face of cumbersome, inadequate, and even unresponsive public support systems. However, our research suggests that private initiatives reproduce, rather than ameliorate, already existing inequalities for survivors—not just in terms of financial support needed to move through the aftermath of gun violence but also in the gender-racialized discourses of worthiness that render some victims grieve-able and others invisible. Similar to GoFundMe campaigns for educational expenses or healthcare needs, the experience of gun violence is unconscionably unequal and so are the social supports in its aftermath.
Hundreds of thousands of people become gun violence survivors every year: people who are shot and survive, people whose loved ones are wounded or killed by guns, and people who live in communities impacted by gun violence. Historically, most of the debate surrounding gun violence has revolved around prevention—a crucial conversation. Alongside that conversation, however, we must talk about how to support those who are now living in gun violence’s aftermath. According to the advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety, at present, only nine states use federal Victims of Crime Act funds specifically for gun violence survivor support and/or gun violence intervention. But, as awareness of the broader ramifications of gun violence continues to grow, states are considering and implementing other types of programs and resources. For example, following California’s lead, a handful of states are considering bills that would fund resources for gun violence survivors by taxing guns and ammunition sales; California’s new law is set to take effect in July 2024. The extent that which these initiatives may effectively support survivors—as opposed to replicate the shortcomings of existing systems—is an open question. But one thing is clear: rather than leaving survivors to bear the burdens of gun violence alone, supporting gun violence survivors—including and especially financially supporting those most vulnerable—must be part of the policy conversation.