Mass shootings in the United States generate intense media, public, and political attention, often leading to strong policy responses as well. But according to a recent working paper, those responses aren’t exactly what you might expect. Professors at Harvard Business School researched the aftermath of mass shootings and found that while these events did often lead to a significant increase in gun legislation, those efforts actually tend to make guns more available to the public. Here’s what you need to know about the new research:

The Main Takeaways

While most attempts to study gun legislation focus on the efforts’ effects on the sale and use of guns, these researchers sought to understand what prompts changes in gun laws. Professors Michael Luca, Deepak Malhotra, and Christopher Poliquin highlight three primary findings from their research:

• Mass shootings are salient public events that lead to strong policy responses from state legislatures.
• Despite the relatively small number of people who die from mass shootings–by their measure, fewer than 100 people die each year due to public mass shootings while approximately 30,000 people die from gun violence each year–such events have a disproportionate effect on gun legislation.
• They find, surprisingly, that mass shootings lead to a loosening of state gun laws. This is largely because both parties respond to gun violence in different ways and legislatures controlled by Republicans are more likely to enact new gun laws after a mass shooting.

The researchers find that a single mass shooting corresponds with a 15 percent increase in gun legislation introduced the following year. They note in the paper, “A single mass shooting leads to an approximately 15 percent increase in the number of firearm bills introduced within a state in the year after a mass shooting.” That increase is particularly significant in the context of gun-related deaths. Under their measure of mass shootings, these incidents lead to about 0.3 percent of all gun deaths but prompt a significant amount of legislation.

While it may not be surprising that high-profile events lead to political responses, the extent of that response may be. According to the researchers:

Our estimates suggest that the per-death impact of mass shootings on bills introduced is about 66 times as large as the impact of gun homicides in non-mass shooting incidents.

Policy Responses

Another important takeaway is that these events tend to spark strong responses from policymakers, but the content of those responses–whether they are proposals to strengthen or loosen gun control laws–largely depends on the party in control of the state legislature. They find that in Republican-controlled legislatures, mass shootings lead to a 75 percent increase in laws that loosen gun restrictions. On the other hand, they found no statistically significant effect on enacted laws when Democrats control the legislature.

In their research, the authors looked at several reports and databases of mass shootings in combination with the LexisNexis bill tracking service in order to determine the legislative response to mass shootings. After identifying bills proposed in response to mass shootings, they coded each bill in terms of whether they tightened or loosened gun laws. To isolate incidents that are generally considered mass shootings, they only looked at shootings that are public events, with three or more deaths, and where the victims are not related to the shooter. They also controlled for a wide range of variables to try and find a causal connection between these shootings and enacted laws.

Looking at state government responses to these events provides some important, and often overlooked, insight into how mass shootings shape gun policy. We might assume that when tragic events like these occur and generate a large amount of attention, policymakers would respond with laws that restrict gun sales. While that does happen, when you look at bills that make it all the way into law, they tend to have the opposite effect.

Party Control Matters

Because Republicans generally do not believe that stronger gun control will reduce mass shootings, they instead respond to these events with laws that correspond to their underlying ideological views. When looking at laws that were actually enacted, the evidence suggests that Republicans are more likely to put their policy preferences into effect. While the researchers do not attempt to explain why in their paper, they find that Democrat-controlled legislatures do not lead to a significant increase in enacted laws that restrict gun sales.

Gun control is one of the most polarizing issues in American politics, with Republicans and Democrats strongly split on the appropriate level of restrictions for gun buyers. This split explains, in part, why politics largely determines the response to these events. Put simply, these events tend to drive policymakers to push for laws that their existing political beliefs support; and Republican-controlled legislatures are considerably more likely to put those laws into effect.

One of the primary problems here–and an important driver of political polarization between the two parties–is a lack of consensus on effective policies to prevent gun violence. Democrats believe that additional restrictions and safeguards to prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands are necessary. Meanwhile, Republicans are skeptical of the effectiveness of these efforts and argue that people should be entitled to protect themselves from danger. As a result, policymakers respond to mass shootings based on what they already hold to be true and not necessarily with evidenced-based proposals to reduce gun violence.

What’s Next?

This research also highlights some important questions for policymaking going forward. In the paper, the authors write:

We find that even random and infrequent events that account for a relatively small portion of total societal harm in a domain might nonetheless be crucial levers for policy consideration and change.

Although they find that the responses to mass shootings are largely based on existing ideology, it’s worth questioning whether events–which account for about 0.3 percent of all gun deaths–should have such an outsized influence.

The important takeaway from all of this isn’t necessarily that public mass shootings lead to looser gun laws, but why exactly that happens. In the United States, American citizens and their elected officials are far from consensus on what the best response to gun violence should be. While research suggests we should treat gun violence as a public health issue–much like tobacco or automobile accidents–agreement on specific policies can be difficult to come by and the solutions are often more complicated than simply making it harder to buy guns.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

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The gridlock over American gun laws may actually be worse than the arguments over American healthcare. Whenever there is a mass shooting (defined in this post as four or more people killed), there are calls for stricter gun control, but those calls are never answered because an agreement on what to do is never reached. The voices against gun control are so loud and so rooted in paranoia in organizations like the National Rifle Association, that a meaningful solution seems impossible. We hear the same arguments over and over again, and over and over again, yet nothing is done and another act of gun violence occurs.

What people so adamant about the need for guns may not understand is that gun control–in all likelihood–will not take all the guns away. Instead, it will make the ability to obtain firearms much more difficult, and as we can see by looking at other countries who have successfully enforced such laws, the number of gun crimes will go down as a result.

“But we’re not like those countries!” Gun enthusiasts will say. “We’re America!”

Of course, they’re right. We aren’t like those countries. We’re larger, we have more guns per person, and damn it, our right to bear arms is right in our Constitution!

But when it comes to issues like this, when people are consistently losing their lives to gun-related crimes and accidents, the definition of insanity applies: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is ridiculous. It clearly isn’t working, so is it so insane to want to change something?

When faced with such a massively divisive issue, I find it helpful to go straight to the facts. In his speech acknowledging the most recent mass shooting in Oregon, President Obama implored news organizations to focus on the numbers. Many have done just that.

According to the above video, since 1997, the United States of America has had 51 mass killings. 51.

This is unacceptable.

Now is the time that the anti-gun control camp will chime in with this solution: more guns will make us safer.

If more #sane #people were #armed #crazy #people would get off #fewer #shots #LetsGetWordy http://t.co/g5f2HAvQkM pic.twitter.com/Ay1HO0Fd70

— Pete Thompson (@earningamotorcy) August 15, 2014

Well wait a second, didn’t we just learn that there are over 88 guns to every 100 people in the U.S.? Is that not enough guns to, supposedly, be protected? And even if someone with a gun were on the premises of every mass shooting, the one doing the shooting initially has the advantage, and people will probably still die. Instead of encouraging more gun sales, maybe we encourage better gun safety: background checks into those wanting to buy firearms, mandatory registration for every firearm owned by a United States resident, and a more developed process for obtaining concealed-carry licenses in each state.

But the Second Amendment says “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Isn’t a firearm registration system and stricter rules for obtaining guns infringement?

Here we find ourselves in a problem that applies to laws other than gun control: are the rules our founding fathers established still relevant in today’s society? In the case of owning a gun, not really.

You have to force yourself to think about society during America’s development: we were in the midst of a revolution, we had a much smaller population, and we were exploring new land to the west, so owning a gun to hunt for food and to protect yourself against enemy soldiers made sense. But what about now–in 2015? Gun control laws won’t take away your hobbies: heading to the gun range for target practice, or going quail hunting during its season. You will still be able to keep a gun locked up in your home for “protection,” so really, is the Second Amendment changing much? And if it did, would it really be a bad thing?

More than any other argument used to dismiss gun control, the one most often cited is “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” That’s right: people wielding guns kill people. We do indeed have a mental health crisis in this country, but it is not necessarily related to the number of mass shootings. If asked to characterize a mass murderer, what would the identifiers be? Crazy? Mentally unbalanced? Maybe, but how can we possibly tell that ahead of time? The obvious answer to this is a mental health evaluation before being allowed to purchase a firearm. Even then, not all mass murderers are obviously unwell.

In fact, as John Oliver points out in the video below, fewer than five percent of gun-related killings are performed by mentally unwell people.

So what do we do about the gun problem we so obviously have in our country? It won’t be a simple solution, but at this point, any solution is better than nothing.

Morgan McMurray

Morgan McMurray is an editor and gender equality blogger based in Seattle, Washington. A 2013 graduate of Iowa State University, she has a Bachelor of Arts in English, Journalism, and International Studies. She spends her free time writing, reading, teaching dance classes, and binge-watching Netflix. Contact Morgan at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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