The Effect of Real-World Events on Political Attitudes and Preference Intensity: Evidence from Mass Shootings

Since the earliest studies of public opinion, scholars have highlighted the difficulty in persuading people to change their minds. Nevertheless, decades of research suggest that real-world events may play a unique role in shaping public opinion. Studies of terrorist attacks, war casualties, wildfires, and other policy-relevant events underscore the impact of these events on people in close geographic and temporal proximity. In contemporary U.S. politics, mass shootings constitute a unique opportunity to study the effects of recurring real-world events on preferences. Previous studies of mass shootings leverage increasing availability of survey data to explore how this type of event shapes preferences for gun control, but arrive at divergent conclusions over whether or how these events affect support for restrictive gun policies. In this paper, I combine nearly 500,000 interviews conducted between July 2019 and January 2021 with the locations of 10 mass shootings to estimate whether mass shootings affect political attitudes and the intensity of those attitudes. By examining subsets of these events through two causally credible research designs, I am able to estimate very small effects on public opinion. My findings suggest that mass shootings have no appreciable effects on the gun policy attitudes of people living in close geographic proximity; nor do mass shootings affect the policy preferences of people around the country, on average. Similarly shootings do not usually change the intensity of peoples' preferences on gun policies among those in proximity to the incidents or elsewhere. The most egregious mass shootings, however, appear to result in nationwide increases in the perceived importance of gun control policies in the days after the incidents. Unlike terrorist attacks, war deaths, and wildfires, gun violence does not seem to change Americans' policy attitudes, no matter how close or far away they are from the incidents.