POLITICS AND GUNS
If you think gun control marches don’t do anything. You are wrong.
New study shows post-Parkland protests increase chance states adopting new gun laws
After a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018 that left 17 people dead, a group of surviving students organized a series of protest marches around the country, urging action on gun control, and occasionally sparking counter-protests from gun rights supporters. While this surge of protest activity failed to affect changes in federal gun control policy due to gridlock in Washington, it would be a mistake to assume it was ineffectual.
On gun control as on many other issues, it is state governments that make most of the consequential decisions, and most protest activity took place in the states rather than the District of Columbia.
In a new article in Policy Studies Journal, my coauthor Jake Haselswerdt and I evaluate the impact of gun-related protest on subnational policymaking. We examine the impact of protest on policy change using an original weekly panel dataset of progress on both gun control and pro-gun legislation in the states between 2017 and 2019, the 3-year period surrounding the Parkland shooting. We paired this with weekly protest march data.
Gun control is a long-standing and highly controversial issue in American politics. Historically, the National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies in Congress and state government (who are largely but not exclusively Republican) have strongly opposed any gun control legislation. While the NRA represents, at least in part, the interests of gun manufacturers, it also has a large and active membership of gun owners that it can mobilize in the name of defending and expanding gun rights.
On the other side, a movement of gun control advocates backed by a network of policy organizations like the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America advocate for restrictions like background checks for gun buyers and the banning of specific types of weapons.
While there is a long history of popular mobilization on both sides of the gun control issue, there was a considerable uptick in gun control marches around the US following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018, as this figure demonstrates. Another spike in mobilization for gun control followed the fatal shooting of eleven congregants at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA by an anti-Semitic terrorist on October 27, 2018. Overall, marches demanding gun control dwarf pro-gun marches during this period, though there is a spike in counter-protest activity around the time of the Parkland-inspired March for Our Lives in March of 2018.
Popular mobilization on firearm policy has more than one potential audience. Gun control is a major national issue in the US, but as with many issues in American politics, much of the actual action takes place at the state level. National laws on guns are relatively rare, and there are few national restrictions on the policies that states can make, with some limited exceptions.
Unsurprisingly, then, states vary widely on a number of key policy questions, including who can legally purchase a firearm, the processes (including background checks) the buyer must go through to make such a purchase, the types of firearms and accessories that may be purchased or owned, the types of modifications that may be made to a gun, how and where a gun may be carried, and many more. States also differ in terms of gun policy agendas. In some state legislatures, the only debates are over whether and how to further restrict the ownership and use of firearms, while in others, the dominant question is whether the state should loosen such restrictions and make it easier to own guns.
Our original collection of weekly state legislative activity on gun policy issues between 2017 and 2019 (using the NRA Institute for Legislative Action’s archive of alerts) suggest that there is a considerable variation in action or movement on gun-related legislation as well as final enactments of laws over the states and the time period. The former is a more direct reflection of policymakers’ responses to protest, whereas the latter is complicated by a variety of institutional factors.
We find a positive and statistically significant association between the size of gun control marches and the probability of a state taking action on gun control legislation in the following week. An increase of 1,000 participants in gun control marchers increases the probability of legislative action the following week by around 5% to 6%, and increases the probability of enacting such legislation into law the following month by 1% to 3%. On the other hand, pro-gun marches seem to have had little to no effect on legislative activity or enactment during this time period.
Does popular protest spur state governments to act?
Our study suggests that it does, at least in some instances, but that effects are not necessarily symmetrical for both sides of a policy issue. Our findings should be generalizable to other policy areas that share similar characteristics: high levels of state or local government discretion, high salience, and a mobilized constituency on each side of the issue. The issues of race and policing and COVID-19 response (including lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine requirements), among others, meet these criteria. Our study suggests that we should pay careful attention to the agenda-setting power of popular protest.
