Mass Shootings and Civilian Armament

Alexei Anisin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367757502
• eBook ISBN: 9781000474114
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Politische Ideologien

Mass Shootings and Civilian Armament provides the first comprehensive multi-methodological analysis of the relationship between mass shootings and firearm purchases (as proxied by background checks) in the US on national level data from 1999-2020.

Since 1994, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US has doubled to around 398 million while the population only grew by 70 million. On average, mass shootings have occurred once every two weeks over the last decade which is a major factor behind why social scientists have started to ask whether mass shootings play a causative role in civilian decisions to purchase guns. Utilizing a multi-methodological approach featuring quantitative, comparative/configurational, and qualitative methods, this book puts forward a theoretical framework and argues that mass shootings do increase civilian armament, but that this repetitious effect is historically contingent, asymmetric, and non-linear. Particular types of mass shootings are hypothesized to have driven and continue to bring about increased levels of civilian firearm purchases through different pathways and combinations of variables – those that feature high fatality counts; arise in areas of cultural importance, are ideologically motivated. First, inquiry into background check data (1999-2020) and data on 213 mass shootings and attempted mass shootings is carried out to find out which shootings (as well as controls) are significantly correlated with background check increases. Second, the findings are utilized in a theoretically driven comparative configurational assessment to test if the noted theoretical pathways are associated with the outcome of increased post-shooting armament. Third, the empirical analyses are complimented by three case studies – the 2011 Gabrielle Giffords shooting (illustrative of the high fatality pathway), the 2012 Colorado movie theater shooting (illustrative of the cultural pathway), and the 2015 Charleston Church shooting (illustrative of the ideologically driven pathway).

Interdisciplinary in nature, Mass Shootings and Civilian Armament will not only be of great interest to scholars of Criminology, but will also speak to sociologists, economists, public policy scholars, political scientists, historians, as well as cultural studies and American studies scholars.

1Introduction

How mass shootings spur gun purchases

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163848-1

Just a day before New Year’s Eve in 2019, a middle-aged man named Keith Kinnunen entered a Texas church during Sunday service wearing a fake wig, a beard, a hat, and a long coat. He walked down the side of the many rows that filled the West Freeway Church of Christ until he approached the communion server and pulled out a 12-gauge shotgun. The chain of events moved fast; most of the crowd did not notice or even glance over to see what was happening. Kinnunen opened fire and killed parishioners Anton Wallace and Richard White and seriously injured another civilian. Meanwhile, standing at the back end of the church, Jack Wilson, a 71-year-old retired law enforcement officer, owner of a gun range, and head of church security, reached for his own gun. Wilson took one shot (a head shot) from 30-feet away with his Sig-P229 and fatally wounded Kinnunen (Bleiberg & Stengle, 2019). With two fatalities, the shooting event was prevented from turning into and being classified as a mass shooting (two years prior, another Texas Church shooting at the Sutherland Springs church resulted in 27 fatalities, 20 injuries). Although Wilson proclaimed he is “no hero,” his actions were interpreted as being heroic. Half a year later Texas Governor Greg Abbott awarded Wilson with a newly created prize, the Governor’s Medal of Courage, intended for civilians “who display great acts of heroism by risking their own safety to save another’s life” (Cobler, 2020).

This attempted mass shooting is not only significant because it was physically prevented by a member of the public or because it arose in a place of worship and cultural importance, but because of the post-shooting repercussions it brought about. Wilson’s actions were perceived as being just and moral; he saved dozens of people from potentially getting massacred. The incident made the public contemplate a counterfactual scenario that isn’t limited to what happened in this Texas church, but in their own community – if an active shooter event of this sort arises, and if a civilian like Wilson is not there to save the day, then many would likely die. Police would take an average of five to ten minutes to respond to the incident. Nothing other than Wilson prevented the perpetrator from killing church attendees. For these reasons, post-event frames were articulated by media organizations in which Wilson took on the role of a “good guy with a gun” (Heinz, 2020), and Kinnunen was the deranged bad guy with a gun that had to be stopped. A case of this sort, although only a single incident, exemplifies a logic that has become fairly widespread in the minds of much of the public. If a person can obtain access to a firearm and learn how to use it, he/she may be able to protect themselves, their loved ones, and fellow citizens in times of danger. Danger of this sort, importantly, is not atypical as mass shootings have been observed to occur once every two weeks in the US (Towers et al., 2015). Every time a mass shooting occurs it breaches public security and undermines the state’s ability to provide a crucial public good – that of public safety.

Although mass shootings only make up a small fraction of the overall homicide rate and violent crime has actually been on the decline (Santos & Testa, 2019), these atrocities are alarming, symbolic, highly graphic, and have increased in frequency over the last two decades. They are also necessarily directed towards civilians in the public sphere, and often this grave form of violence gets carried out by offender(s) in an indiscriminate manner. These dynamics contribute to the formation of ideas throughout society about future possible occurrences of such atrocities and the likelihood that they can arise in everyday life. Many institutions and media organizations have defined mass shootings according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) classification of an “active shooter event” in which an individual “actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Nevertheless, while frequently discussed in public discourse, mass shootings have historically been difficult to define in both legal institutional contexts and throughout academia (Huff-Corzine & Corzine, 2020). Social scientists have attached more definitive parameters in their definitions of mass shootings. This book partially draws from the following operationalization by Silva and Capellan (2019) who refer to mass shootings as “mass public shootings,” which are events that are said to possess the following characteristics:

a mass public shooting is an incident of targeted violence where an offender has killed or attempted to kill four or more victims on a public stage. (1) the act can involve more than one offender and take place at multiple related locations within a 24-hour time period; (2) the main weapon has to be a firearm; and (3) the shooting is not related to state-sponsored or profit-driven criminal activity (e.g. drug trafficking or gang shootings).

(Silva & Capellan, 2019)

Throughout this book, I will refer to mass public shootings simply as mass shootings. I will consider a completed mass shooting as a case that results in three or more fatalities (not including the offender), and cases that resulted in less than three fatalities will be referred to as attempted mass shootings. In the empirical analyses of this book, I will assess 213 different mass shootings and attempted mass shootings. This definition accounts for several characteristics that are important for our understanding of the nature of this phenomenon. First and foremost, investigating attempted and completed mass shootings is of relevance for statistical sampling purposes and for the general soundness of comparative inquiry. Second, although nearly all mass shootings are carried out by a single offender and upwards of 90% are carried out by males (Hickey, 2012; Lankford, 2013), there have been very significant rare cases such as the 1999 Columbine school massacre or the 2015 San Bernardino shooting that were committed by two perpetrators. Being able to consider such cases in a given sample for empirical analysis is important. Third, this definition of mass shootings is also necessarily dependent on the usage of a firearm (or firearms) which sets apart this phenomenon from other public-style attacks such as suicide bombing or the Indonesian and East Asian knifing sprees that have arisen over the last several decades.

This book contends that mass shootings are contributing to increases in rates of civilian armament, specifically to the total number of new guns that get purchased and go into civilian households. I refer to the relationship between mass shootings and gun purchases as the mass shootings-background check nexus. Since the late 1990s and specifically since the 1999 Columbine school massacre, there has been a persistent increase in mass shootings across the US and interestingly enough, the late 1990s also constitute a time period in which rates of civilian armament began to skyrocket. It is also true that the US is in a league of its own when it comes to mass shooting occurrences in comparison to other liberal democratic contexts. The proportion of public shooting attacks is four to ten times greater in America than in Europe and Asia (Lankford, 2019, p. 74). The total number of guns in the US has nearly doubled in just two decades. As of 2018, rates of gun ownership in the US were around 120 firearms for every 100 residents – entailing there were around 393 million guns (pistols; revolvers; rifles; shotguns) in the country (Karp, 2018). In contrast, Japan has one firearm for every 100 residents. We are currently witnessing a historical increase in civilian armament rates. In 1994, there were an estimated 192 million firearms in the US (Ludwig & Cook, 2000). In just under a quarter of a century, the number of firearms doubled (51% increase) while the population only grew by 70 million (from 260 to 330 million). These transformative changes have begun to receive scholarly attention. Over the last five years, social scientists have observed that mass shootings are correlated with civilian armament. In this scholarly literature, researchers rely on proxy measures of gun purchases because direct measures of gun purchases are not available to the public. Hence, background check data drawn from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) gets utilized.

The mechanisms and processes behind the proposed causal association between mass shootings and gun purchases are relatively complex if we consider that not just one particular event has been linked to post-shooting civilian decisions to buy guns, but a plethora of high-profile incidents have become ingrained into the historical consciousness of the nation. These include the 1999 Columbine school massacre, the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, and the 2019 Parkland school shooting, among many others. Much of the public has listened to news about these events, watched documentaries, witness testimonies, engaged in personal discussions, public debates, arguments on public forums throughout social media, and have read magazines, newspapers, and journals about these atrocities. Mass shootings are heavily reported on by media organizations (Anisin, 2021). This is linked to a larger empirical uniformity in that severe forms of homicide are likelier to be covered by media than single victim homicide. For example, mass homicide has been observed to receive 59% coverage in comparison to 32% coverage that regular homicide receives, 10% coverage of suicide by firearm, and 4% coverage of gun accidents (Jashinsky et al., 2017). In quantitative research, sociologists, criminologists, and increasingly political scientists have contributed to a variety of different topics pertaining to mass shootings. Inquiry on mass shootings has been and continues to be published in top ranked and international indexed journals, as well as in highly regarded university and scientific presses. Along similar lines, in media and communication outlets, mass shootings have received a substantial degree of attention from organizations ranging from the New York Times, the Washington Post, to the BBC and the Economist (Lankford & Madfis, 2018). Since there is extensive public awareness of mass shootings, every time a new case arises, different pathways and causal mechanisms get triggered that lead civilians to purchase firearms.

The determinants of gun purchases

Civilians have always purchased guns throughout the last century of history, but rates of armament over the last two decades have increased at a rapid rate, which begs the question, why? What can account for this mass increase in the total number of guns in America? There are a number of different determinants behind why civilians purchase guns, some having to do directly with mass shootings and others that have to with general consumption patterns. A mechanism scholars believe is driving post-shooting public decisions to purchase firearms reflects the preventive scenario described above with Wilson and his actions in a Texas church. In order to overcome a heterogeneous manifestation of fearful emotions, civilians arm themselves in belief that they can potentially prevent, stop, or slowdown a mass shooting (Anisin, 2019; Buttrick, 2020; Swift, 2013). Scholars have linked severe violence and mass shootings to increases in fear throughout the populace (Altheide, 2002, 2006, 2009; Dowd-Arrow et al., 2019; Wallace, 2015). The first study on fear of crime and gun sales was conducted half of a century ago through analysis of handgun permit applications and civil disorder in Detroit, Michigan (Newton & Zimring, 1968). Recent national surveys (2017) have revealed that upwards of 70% of the American population that live in urban and suburban zones described protection as being their primary motivation for owning a gun (Parker et al., 2017). Similarly, scholars have recently noted that mass shootings have a propensity to bring about anxious responses (Joslyn & Heider-Merkel, 2018), which pertains to the grander idea that mass shootings make individuals fearful for their security in the public sphere (Anisin, 2019).

Mass media play a monumental role in propelling fearful responses to news events throughout the populace. Violent crime has been observed to be sensationalized by media as media cater to the public’s fascination with crime and especially to highly sensationalist acts of violence (Lawrence & Mueller, 2003). Sensational news stories have even grown more prominent with the rampant increase in “click-bait” or “click-driven” journalism that has emerged within the age of social media–based information technology. For example, a string of recent studies have built on Duwe’s research (2000), in which it was demonstrated that shootings with high fatality counts are likeliest to receive extensive media coverage. Schildkraut et al. (2018) as well as Silva and Capellan (2019) added to these claims by statistically measuring characteristics of the “most covered” mass shootings through total New York Times article counts of each shooting. It was discovered that fatality counts drive coverage as do several other factors including the race of offenders (non-white/Mid-Eastern perpetrators), the location of a given shooting, as well as if it was carried out due to ideological intent (or motivation). These factors were correlated with heightened media coverage of mass shootings (Silva & Capell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Introduction: How mass shootings spur gun purchases
• 2 Why the current era of gun culture differs from the past
• 3 Case studies, processes, and causal mechanisms
• 4 Descriptive trends in background checks and mass shootings
• 5 Quantitative analysis of mass shootings and background checks, 1999–2020
• 6 A configurational analysis of mass shootings and background checks
• 7 Looking ahead, has a ceiling been reached?
• Index