Mass Shootings by the Numbers
By Zach Drapkin
The United States’ gun violence epidemic reared its ugly head once again last week when former NFL player Phillip Adams gunned down five victims and then shot himself in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
News of another mass shooting is no longer a surprise for most Americans. The U.S. has been devastated by similar incidents time and time again over the past few decades as the government fails to take effective legislative action to curb its country’s gun problem. There have been an astounding 2,000 mass shootings in the U.S. since just August 11, 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive. During that stretch, 2,094 people have been killed and 8,546 others have been injured as a result of mass shootings.
Following the most recent wave of shootings, President Joe Biden spoke about U.S. gun violence, calling it “an epidemic and it is an international embarrassment.” Biden proposed a number of executive actions to combat the issue, mainly regarding the regulation of certain gun kits, parts, and accessories which make it easier for people to acquire and assemble their own deadly firearms.
Efforts to lessen gun violence through legislation have been largely unsuccessful for decades due to lobbying from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other organizations supporting 2nd amendment rights. Regulating firearms would not be a popular political move and many Republican congressmen receive heavy funding from the NRA. Additionally, with local governments putting their own sets of laws in place, creating a blanket policy for preventing shootings at a national level is quite the tall task.
Gun violence is more of a problem in certain states than in others, as is clearly visible in the map above. In fact, five states (Hawaii, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, and Vermont) have had zero mass shootings dating back to August 2016, while five others (Illinois, California, Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania) have had more than 100 shootings over that span. For many states, these high gun violence numbers can be explained by systematic differences in gun access and regulation.
Access to Gun Dealers
One popular hypothesis for why the United States is far behind other developed countries in regard to gun violence is that other countries heavily restrict their citizens’ access to guns. Even within the states, there is significant variability in how easy it is to purchase a gun, both from a legal perspective and a convenience perspective.
Thanks to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), we can access listings of all licensed firearm dealers in each state and examine the relationship between firearm dealer access (per square kilometer) and mass shootings.
Indeed, states with easier access to licensed firearm dealers (parties with type 01 or type 09 licenses) tend to have more mass shootings. This suggests the aforementioned hypothesis, that greater access to guns leads to more gun violence, is a reasonable explanation for the U.S.’s gun violence problem.
A clear takeaway here: any policy that restricts a person’s ability to acquire a firearm will likely lower gun violence rates.
Gun Control Politics & Policy
To that end, the restriction of assault weapons is a popular proposal for limiting gun violence. Due to the political challenges of passing gun control laws, however, only eight states have successfully passed legislation which bans assault weapons: California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Virginia.
All eight of those states’ local governments are controlled by the Democratic Party, which has been a strong advocate for gun control. To their credit, those states have experienced fewer mass shootings per 100,000 people (0.496 vs 0.643) and fewer mass shooting deaths per 100,000 people (0.446 vs 0.710) compared to states without bans on assault weapons.
Banning assault weapons, the firearm of choice for most of the deadliest incidents in recent history, seems like a sensible policy that more states should adopt. Yet this seems unlikely for many states, as Republican state legislatures have continued to shoot down any attempt to limit access to any type of firearm.
Do states with more Republican support suffer more from mass shootings then? Have more liberal states had success combatting gun violence with gun control measures?
In short, yes. Using 2020 presidential election results, we can see that higher support for the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump, at the state level is correlated with more mass shootings and more mass shooting deaths.
But the issue is not so cut and dry. These correlations are not particularly strong (r = 0.07 and r = 0.14, respectively) and plenty of red states have low mass shooting numbers. Looking at the bottom right quadrant of both graphs, it appears that some of the less densely populated red states in the Midwest and Northwest areas of the country have pretty low mass shooting rates. Possible explanations for these states as exceptions are that fewer people around means fewer targets, or that citizens of these states are better trained in firearm safety due to the prevalence of hunting in the region.
Socioeconomic Determinants
Another approach to combatting gun violence is figuring out which demographic and socioeconomic factors tend to coincide with gun violence. People resort to violence more frequently within certain psychological and environmental states, so it’s important to understand what drives people to take the most dire measures to deal with their troubles.
Violence is often regarded as a symptom of poverty because when people of lower socioeconomic status have fewer opportunities to escape poverty and the challenges associated with it. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between a state’s poverty rate and its mass shooting total (r = 0.57). The high violent crime rates in Chicago, IL and Baltimore, MD are notable examples of this phenomenon.
Additionally, we find that the percentage of a state’s population with a bachelor degree is negatively correlated with mass shootings (r = -0.40), meaning more access to higher education tends to coincide with fewer incidences of gun violence.
Like so many of our nation’s other problems, gun violence can be traced back to discrepancies in wealth and education. And there is no easy fix for the systemic, centuries-long inequalities in these areas.
Conclusions
Gun violence is a complex issue to tackle in the current political climate, and while it may seem unrealistic to expect widespread policy to fall into place anytime soon, there are signs of hope. The evidence supports the notion that restricting gun access leads to less gun violence, and eight blue states have already seen positive results from banning assault weapons. With the Democratic Party in control of the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, there’s a chance that gun control bills might just make it through Congress.
Where guns are available, they will inevitably become a vehicle for frustration and struggle. Poverty and education are important contributing factors to the high gun violence rates in the U.S., and with the 2nd amendment here to stay, we should be addressing those issues head on in whatever way we can.
Data & References
Mass shooting data — Gun Violence Archive (https://www.gunviolencearchive.org)
Firearm license listings — Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives (https://www.atf.gov/firearms/listing-federal-firearms-licensees)
2020 election results — Kaggle (https://www.kaggle.com/unanimad/us-election-2020)
State socioeconomic data — NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center, George Mason University (https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5729/5/4/118/htm)
