Hate-Inspired Mass Violence and Vicissitudes in Legislative Behavior and Governmental Responses

The U.S. leads the world in the number of violent mass shootings that occur each year, with many of these tragedies being manifestations of group-based hate. We seek to understand how, if at all, communities affected by these events engage in self-healing activities wherein the localized political systems respond to violence by enacting solutions looking towards preventing hate-inspired mass shootings and other forms of firearm violence from reoccurring. In this project, we will pair a dataset on all 111 public mass shootings from 2000 to 2022 with an independently collected dataset of state legislators’ roll-call voting records on gun-related bills. We will utilize a mixed-methods approach relying on qualitative interviews with legislators and modern techniques for causal inference. As hate-inspired political violence has been increasing in recent years, understanding the ways in which our legislative institutions and representatives respond to these events is critical for assessing the overall health of our democracy and developing strategies to counteract these events and prevent them from occurring in the future. Our results will speak to the public health effects of hate-inspired mass violence, and shed light on the manners by which the government responds – or fails to respond – to violent manifestations of hate.