Abstract
I analyze attitudes towards gun control from a recent survey of American high school students. For students who most closely identify as Republicans, cueing them to think about prior school shootings increases their agreement that armed staff in schools will improve safety and arming citizens will reduce risk of mass shootings. For those identifying as Democrats and Independents, providing them with selective information that certain states have loose gun control laws and low rates of gun violence makes them more supportive of gun rights. For Republicans, providing selective information that certain states have loose gun control laws and high rates of gun violence makes them less supportive of gun rights. These results suggest that emotional cues may exacerbate a priori biases, while informational cues may be more likely to change people’s minds about firearm policies.
Highlights
I analyze attitudes towards gun control from a recent survey of American high school students
I augment these results with probit models for strongly agreeing with certain statements versus all of the other categories to account for the possibility that the effects of cueing and framing are concentrated at the extremes
I have conducted an analysis of youth attitudes towards guns and gun and school violence using a new data set of American High School seniors, juniors, and sophomores
Summary
There are many strands of literature on the formation of political beliefs and attitudes of young people. They find that Republicans are more likely to support rights to carry concealed handguns when questions are presented in an “individual rights” frame, relative to being presented in a “public safety” frame, but these framing effects are not present for Democrats Likewise, they show that the impact of framing in attributing blame for school shootings depends on the relationship between the type of framing and the predisposition of respondents. I analyze the effects of several different types of cues and frames on opinions about gun rights and gun control Within this specific literature, a number of factors have been shown to influence views on violence, guns, and gun laws. I test to see how the type and nature of particular cues or frames affect beliefs on gun rights and gun control, and whether this interacts with one’s predisposition towards a particular issue as proxied by party identification
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