Gun control

When Mass Shootings Lead To Looser Gun Restrictions

In the United States, there’s much debate over whether gun-related legislation can diminish the likelihood of mass shootings. New research from Harvard Business School turns the question on its head: Do mass shootings lead to more gun-related legislation?

The answer is yes, with an important twist. In states with Republican-controlled legislatures, mass shootings lead to a significant increase in the number of laws that loosen gun restrictions. That’s one of several key findings in the study “The Impact of Mass Shootings on Gun Policy,” co-authored by Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra, and Christopher Poliquin.

The researchers constructed a dataset of all gun-related legislation and mass shootings in the United States from 1989 to 2014, using data from LexisNexis, the Mass Shootings in America (MSA) project at Stanford University, and a list of shootings created by USA Today. They focused on state rather than Federal regulations, as state governments are the primary regulators of firearms.