Online interest regarding violent attacks, gun control, and gun purchase: A causal analysis

Abstract

BackgroundIncreased interest about gun ownership and gun control are oftentimes driven by informational shocks in a common factor, namely violent attacks, and the perceived need for higher levels of safety. A causal depiction of the societal interest around violent attacks, gun control and gun purchase, both synchronous and over time, should be a stepping stone for designing future strategies regarding the safety concerns of the U.S. population.ObjectiveExamine the causal relationships between unexpected increases in population interest about violent attacks, gun control, and gun purchase.MethodsRelationships among online searches for information about violent attacks, gun control, and gun purchase occurring between 2004 and 2017 in the U.S. are explained through a novel structural vector autoregressive time series model to account for simultaneous causal relationships.ResultsMore than 20% of the stationary variability in each of gun control and gun purchase interest can be explained by the remaining factors. Gun control interest appears to be caused, in part, by violent attacks informational shocks, yet violent attacks, although impactful, have a lesser effect than gun control debate on long-term gun ownership interests.ConclusionsThe form in which gun control has been introduced in public debate may have further increased gun ownership interest. Reactive gun purchase interest may be an unintended side effect of gun control debate. U.S. policymakers may need to rethink current approaches to promotion of gun control, and whether societal policy debate without policy outcomes could be having unintended effects.

Attention and counter-framing in the Black Lives Matter movement on Twitter

“…Our work builds on a number of recent analyses that employ similar methods, including a comprehensive set of topic models published by Giorgi et al ( 2022 ). In so doing, the current paper contributes to the growing body of work on Black Lives Matter (Crenshaw et al, 2015 ; Gallagher et al, 2018 ; Lebron, 2017 ), the broader literature on online social movements (Hara and Huang, 2011 ; Harlow, 2012 ; Tufekci, 2017 ), and the still nascent study of attentional dynamics in virtual environments (Freelon et al, 2020 ; Gunn et al, 2018 ; Hendricks and Vestergaard, 2019 ).…”

“…An autoregression (AR) predicts the value of a variable on a day as a function of time-lagged values of both that variable and other variables. Autoregression was used successfully by Gunn et al ( 2018 ) to examine online timecourse data about shootings and gun control as a proxy for political engagement. We looked at two autoregressions: Model I: “ Naive ” AR The first autoregression model considered only the number of tweets per day for a group, and predicted these as a function of their own lagged tweets plus lagged protests per day as an exogenous variable.…”

“…We hypothesized, based in part on the work of Gunn et al ( 2018 ) on responsiveness of politically relevant searches after mass shootings, that RQ1 would reveal a pattern whereby politically left-leaning accounts would show a rapid but more transient response to protests, while politically right-leaning accounts would show a smaller but more sustained response partly driven by reaction to the left. While Gunn et al ( 2018 ) don’t explicitly touch on political affiliation, previous work finds that both gun-ownership and attitudes toward gun-control are strongly sorted along partisan lines, with Republicans generally opposing stricter legislation (Wozniak, 2017 ) and owning more firearms (Parker et al, 2017 ). Inasmuch as attitudes toward BLM are polarized along similar ideological cleavages (Alfano et al, 2022 ; Drakulich and Denver, 2022 ), and given that both mass- and police-shootings are violent, shocking events, it stands to reason that patterns in responsiveness to police killings will coincide with partisan identification.…”

Internet search patterns reveal firearm sales, policies, and deaths

“…Studies analyzing gun-related Internet searches have found that U.S. search volume for the term "buy gun" is correlated to the number of firearm background checks performed in the U.S. between 2008 and 2015 (Pearson's r = 0.84) 12 . Studies have also found that search volume for firearm-related terms changes in response to mass shootings 5,[12][13][14][15][16][17][18] . These studies measured overall increases in the volume of search terms before and after mass shootings and found increases of tens or even hundreds of percent.…”

Responses to mass shooting events

“…The substantial attention given to the coverage of public mass shootings in the media is rooted, at least in part, in the interplay between the interest among the general public to seek and consume information, and the motivation of media outlets to provide information about such events. The interest of the general public in mass shooting events can be attributed to a range of motivations, from general curiosity or a desire to obtain information about current news to a concern for public and personal safety (Gunn, Ter Horst, Markossian, & Molina, ; Menachemi, Rahurkar, & Rahurkar, ). Levin and Wiest () recently explored public interest in information after mass shootings (specifically school shootings) identified information seeking, specifically in the context of public and personal protestation and safety, as a generally strong motivator for consuming news about such an event.…”