ArticlePNAS nexus2023
Public mass shootings cause large surges in Americans' engagement with gun policy.
Article in PNAS nexus, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- School shootings and the strategic contributions of gun policy PACs in US House elections.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Firearm Violence and Health in Policymaker Discourse: Mixed Methods Social Media Analysis.JMIR formative research · 2025Article
- The effect of mass shootings on voter turnout in the United States.Science advances · 2025Article
- Gun control and democratic accountability.Science advances · 2025Review
- How do mass shootings shape the social media discourse on guns in the US Congress? Causal discovery and topic modeling.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
As public mass shootings continue to plague the United States, a growing scholarly literature seeks to understand the political effects of these tragic events. This literature, however, focuses on public opinion or turnout and vote choice, leaving open to question whether or not public mass shootings affect a range of other important actions citizens may take to engage with gun policy. Leveraging the as-good-as random timing of high-publicity public mass shootings over the past decade and an immense array of publicly available and proprietary data, we demonstrate that these events consistently cause surges in public engagement with gun policy-including internet searches, streaming documentaries, discussion on social media, signing petitions, and donating to political action committees. Importantly, we document the behaviors where shootings induce polarizing upswings in engagement and those where upswings skew toward gun control. Finally, we demonstrate that low-publicity shootings largely exert little-to-no effect on our outcomes.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.