Research

Abstract

Despite the alarming rise in mass shootings, comprehensive federal gun-control reforms have largely stalled since 1994. This paper investigates whether such tragedies mobilize or suppress political engagement by analyzing campaign contributions in affected areas. Exploiting the quasi-random timing of mass shooting events, I implement a neighboring-tract design using high-frequency contribution data from 2014–2024. Following a mass shooting, affected census tracts experience an approximately cumulative 50% decline in both Democratic and Republican campaign contributions within four months, relative to adjacent tracts where no incident occurred. This decline does not translate into compensating donations to gun-control or pro-gun PACs as the slight increase in these contributions offsets less than 1% of the partisan decline. The effects are highly localized: no comparable decline appears at the county level, even though Google Trends data show that public attention to “shooting” spikes by 0.3 standard deviations in affected counties after an incident. Leveraging cross-border variation in local TV news exposure, I further find that counties within the media market where a shooting occurs are about 10% less likely to contribute to Democratic candidates than neighboring counties across the TV-market border. Only highly publicized, nationally covered shootings generate a short-lived 20–30% surge in donations to gun-control PACs, which dissipates within 72 hours. Taken together, the results suggest that mass shootings, through both direct exposure and media coverage, demobilize local political participation, helping explain the persistent stagnation of gun-control reform in the United States.