Financial Firepower: School Shootings and the Strategic Contributions of Pro-Gun PACs

Eric A. Baldwin, Takuma Iwasaki and John Donohue

No 33900, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Fatal school shootings often spark support for stricter gun laws, threatening the gun lobby’s influence and agenda. To prevent political fallout, do pro-gun Political Action Committees increase contributions after fatal school shootings? Leveraging a novel dataset of pro-gun PAC contributions and school shooting incidents, we implement a difference-in-differences design with staggered treatment adoption to estimate the causal effect of school shootings on contributions to House candidates. We find that pro-gun PACs increase contributions by 30.2% to candidates in districts with fatal school shootings, but show no significant response to non-fatal school shootings or other mass shootings. The temporal pattern reveals strategic behavior: contribution spikes emerge in the wake of fatal school shootings and in proximity to elections, with effects dramatically amplified as Election Day approaches; within two months of Election Day, contributions increase by 1,730%. These effects are concentrated in competitive districts (margins of 5%). Our findings provide robust evidence that pro-gun PACs deploy targeted financial contributions in response to school shootings, with the magnitude and timing suggesting a strategic counter-mobilization effort to maintain influence in affected districts when gun policy becomes locally salient and elections are near. Our findings underscore a gap in democratic accountability: while public opinion should drive policy change, organized interests with financial power can insulate political candidates from public pressure and obstruct its translation into legislative reform.

JEL-codes: C21 C22 C23 D72 D78 K00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
Note: LE PE POL
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33900.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33900

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w33900
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().