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✅   Financial Firepower: School Shootings and the Strategic Contributions of Pro-Gun PACs -- by Eric A. Baldwin, Takuma Iwasaki, John J. Donohue

Politics

Fatal school shootings often spark support for stricter gun laws, threatening the gun lobby’s influence and agenda. To prevent political fallout, do pro-gun Political Action Committees increase contributions after fatal school shootings? Leveraging a novel dataset of pro-gun PAC contributions and school shooting incidents, we implement a difference-in-differences design with staggered treatment adoption to estimate the causal effect of school shootings on contributions to House candidates. We find that pro-gun PACs increase contributions by 30.2% to candidates in districts with fatal school shootings, but show no significant response to non-fatal school shootings or other mass shootings. The temporal pattern reveals strategic behavior: contribution spikes emerge in the wake of fatal school shootings and in proximity to elections, ...

nber.org     Jun 09, 2025