Gun violence is a leading cause of death among children and adolescents in the United States, and school shootings represent one of its most traumatic and visible manifestations. These events can generate severe and long-lasting consequences for children, but also extend beyond direct victims to affect entire communities. Yet responses to this public health crisis remain mired in political polarization: some advocate for stricter firearm regulations to limit opportunities for violence, while others promote expanded access in the name of deterrence. Meanwhile, limited prior empirical work has formally examined firearm legislation as a structural intervention capable of reducing school shooting risk. Integrating 20 years of data on K-12 school shootings (2000-2019) with that on state firearm legislation, we conduct a state-year panel analysis to examine how restrictive firearm laws (measured both as an aggregated restrictiveness index and partitioned by policy type) relate to the incidence of school shootings. Results show that the implementation of more restrictive gun laws is significantly associated with fewer school shootings, yetmeaningful heterogeneity emerges across policy types. Notably, none of the examined laws show evidence of increasing school shootings, contrary to deterrence claims. These findings align with prior literatures linking state firearm legislation and violence, and position firearm regulation as a potential structural intervention for preventing violence against children.
Wippell et al. (Sat,) studied this question.