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Abstract
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Parallel surges for a gun control advocacy group not seen.
School shootings are tragically familiar in the United States. But a new analysis shows they have a startling consequence. In the very counties where they occur, the National Rifle Association (NRA) sees a surge in donation amounts and in new donors that lasts several years after shootings, according to an analysis of 131 school shootings with at least one fatality between 2000 and 2022.
The finding, published today in Science Advances, echoes well-documented surges in gun purchases and donations to NRA, the leading U.S. gun rights lobbyist, after mass shootings. But the hyperlocal effect is new and revealing, researchers not involved in the study say. "Either there's a fear … that someone is going to take your gun away … and/or a fear that you are somehow less safe and therefore need more guns," says Kerri
Raissian, who directs the Center for Advancing Research, Methods, and Scholarship in Gun Injury Prevention at the University of Connecticut. "It says that there is something about this event happening in your county, local to you, that makes this threat more real."
Tobias Roemer, a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Oxford, used a U.S. Federal Election Commission database to track donations after school shootings in 131 counties as well as in the 2758 counties without such school shootings. He found that donations to NRA's political action committee, the Political Victory Fund, climbed on average $970 per year in the affected counties in the 4 years following a school shooting. The number of individual donors in those counties grew by as much as 40%, although numbers were small, peaking at 5 new donors per county. He found no parallel surges in NRA donors and donations in unaffected counties. At the same time, donations to the political action committee of Giffords, which lobbies for gun control and research, did not increase in affected counties...
Language: en |