Hi reddit! I'm Dr Todd Hartman, lecturer in Quantitative Methods, and I
just published a paper on the effect living near a mass shooting in the
US has on support for gun control. AMA!
Abstract
Hi reddit! I’m Dr Todd Hartman, Lecturer in Quantitative Social Science
at the Sheffield Methods Institute in the UK. I am also the SMI’s Q-Step
Director and a Statistical Ambassador for the Royal Statistical Society.
My research focuses on political psychology. Last month I published a
paper with my co-author Dr Benjamin Newman at UC Riverside on Mass
Shootings and Public Support for Gun Control in the British Journal of
Political Science. Polling over the last twenty years shows support for
gun regulation in the US has decreased, but the number of mass shootings
is rising. The US is also a bit of an anomaly compared to countries like
the UK and Australia where mass shooting incidents were followed by
stricter gun control legislation. We wanted to find out what effect
living near a mass shooting had on residents’ attitudes towards gun
control. We also wanted to see whether this effect was different
depending on a person’s political leanings and other factors such as
local gun culture. As part of our study we identified mass shootings in
which three or more members of the general public were injured or killed
with a firearm. This gave us a dataset of 210 incidents between
1966-2015 where a shooter opened fire on seemingly random members of the
public. We paired this with several large and respected public opinion
surveys, the 2010 Cooperative Congressional Election Study and 2010 Pew
Political Independents Survey, which measured respondents’ opinions on
gun control and included other essential control variables. The zipcode
information in the surveys allowed us to measure how close respondents
were to a mass shooting event. Our study found that living near a mass
shooting resulted in a 20 per cent increase in the probability of
supporting stricter gun control. This increase in support was true for
both Democrat and Republican voters. The effect also appears to be
larger 1) for respondents who live near multiple mass shootings, 2) for
shootings with higher numbers of victims, and 3) for more recent events.
For mass shootings with more than 20 victims, for instance, the
difference in probabilities more than doubles in both the 2010 CCES and
the 2010 Pew data. Likewise, living near multiple mass shootings
increases the estimated effect from .14 for one shooting, .35 for two
shootings, and .43 for three shootings in the 2010 Pew data. I’ll be
here to answer your questions at 11am (EST). Ask me anything! Edit:
Thanks for the questions! Edit: I just wanted to thank everyone for all
of the great questions. I really appreciate your interest in the topic
and thoughtful contributions to the AMA. Hopefully, you found it
stimulating. Ok, I’m going to sign off for now but may check back if
there are additional questions or follow-up discussions about anything
else.