Critical Events and Attitude Change: Support for Gun Control After Mass Shootings

Abstract

When and to what extent do crises and significant events induce changes in political attitudes? Theories of public opinion and policymaking predict that major events restructure public opinion and pry open new political opportunities. We examine the effect of major events on support for public policies in the context of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in December 2012 using a nationally representative panel survey of US adults. Across both cross-sectional and within-subject analyses, we find no evidence that Americans granted greater support for gun control after the Sandy Hook shooting. Our null findings persist across a range of political and demographic groups. We also find no evidence of attitude polarization as a result of Sandy Hook. Our results suggest that elite polarization in a particular issue area leads citizens to employ motivated reasoning when interpreting critical events, thereby reducing the capacity for attitude change. Our findings have important implications for identifying the conditions under which major events affect support for public policies and create political opportunities for policy change.

When Beliefs Face Reality: An Integrative Review of Belief Updating in Mental Health and Illness

“…Prominent examples from current political discussions for the persistence of political beliefs despite disconfirmatory evidence are climate-change denial (G. T. Farmer & Cook, 2013; Häkkinen & Akrami, 2014; McCright & Dunlap, 2011), the “vaccination confidence gap” (Browne, Thomson, Rockloff, & Pennycook, 2015; Larson, Cooper, Eskola, Katz, & Ratzan, 2011; Tafuri et al, 2014), and the discussion about gun control in the United States (Rogowski & Tucker, 2018).…”

“…Authors who assume that this truth decay has increased in recent years even speak of a "posttruth" era ( Jasanoff & Simmet, 2017;Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017;Sismondo, 2017) or "postfactual" politics (Sayer, 2017) when characterizing the current (Western) political discourse. Prominent examples from current political discussions for the persistence of political beliefs despite disconfirmatory evidence are climate-change denial (G. T. Farmer & Cook, 2013;Häkkinen & Akrami, 2014;McCright & Dunlap, 2011), the "vaccination confidence gap" (Browne, Thomson, Rockloff, & Pennycook, 2015;Larson, Cooper, Eskola, Katz, & Ratzan, 2011;Tafuri et al, 2014), and the discussion about gun control in the United States (Rogowski & Tucker, 2018).…”

Discrete Events and Hate Crimes: The Causal Role of the Brexit Referendum

“…Social scientists have long been concerned with the role of significant, unexpected, or dramatic events in changing political and social behavior (Borell, 2015; Baumgartner and Jones, 1993; Sorrentino and Vidmar, 1974; Rogowski and Tucker, 2018; Boomgaarden and De Vrees, 2007). The literature, however, on event‐caused hate crimes is relatively recent.…”

Anxious About Social Violence: The Emotional Underpinnings of Support for Gun Control

“…The study finds that anxiety induced people to become more supportive of gun control in an attempt to mitigate risks. However, other studies show no relationship between the occurrence of mass shootings and the public's support for gun restrictions, suggesting that situational anxiety may not affect gun policy preferences (Rogowski and Tucker, 2018; Barney and Schaffner, 2019).…”

“…The implication is that temporal or spatial proximity to such events increases anxiety in people and anxiety may increase support for gun control. However, these findings are contested (Rogowski and Tucker, 2018; Barney and Schaffner, 2019). Experiments have also shown that exposure to stories about mass shootings can lead to increased support for gun control but have not explored the role of anxiety (McGinty, Webster, and Barry, 2013).…”