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.