WSJ Law Blog on “The Shooting Cycle”

January 8th, 2014

Jacob Gershman of The Wall Street Journal Law Blog has a feature on The Shooting Cycle, titled “Why Gun-Controllers Lose Ground After Mass Shootings.” Jacob takes note of how over the last twenty years, the aggregate level of support for stricter gun laws has dropped from 64% to 48%. This trend is accentuated by spikes following mass shootings, with a regression to the declining mean. My co-author, the unnamed Yalie, is Shelby Baird.

I discuss the shooting cycle in detail here.

Final-Polling-Data

Here are the key quotes:

In “The Shooting Cycle,” a new paper co-authored with a Yale student, South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman attempts to explain why gun-control supporters tend to lose ground in the political skirmishing that follows a mass shooting.

He analyzed data from five major polling firms and found that the percentage of Americans in favor of stricter gun support has fallen to 48% in late 2013 from 64% from 1993.

“In other words, after each spike subsides, support for gun control is even lower than it was before the shooting,” he writes. The temporary gains are “powered” by emotions and by their nature fleeting, as views return to normal or “regress to the mean,” he says.

But why, when the dust settles, do gun-control supporters end up with less support for their proposals than existed prior to the event?

Because all too often, according to Mr. Blackman, gun-control supporters aim too high, which only serves to kindle fears that total disarmament is on its way. Citing UCLA law professor and Second Amendment expert Adam Winkler, Mr. Blackman writes that “the fact that ‘[g]uns are permanent in America’ is ‘perhaps the most important’ fact the “gun ban supporters failed to grasp.’”

In the end, Jacob quotes a portion of the paper that focuses on why Manchin-Toomey failed.

Fair enough. But what to make of the failure of more moderate legislative efforts, like the federal Manchin-Toomey bill that Congress shot down last year? After all, Manchin-Toomey chiefly proposed closing a loophole in the requirements for background-checks. It didn’t propose confiscation or, for that matter, requiring gun-owners to register their guns the state.

Writes Mr. Blackman:

When people consider Manchin-Toomey, a universal background check bill that specifically does not provide for registration, they substitute that more difficult-to-assess provision with a simpler one: background checks that lead to registration. Even though they may support background checks in the abstract (as the data supports), they oppose a non-existent bill that does more. Here opponents of the law are being ignorant, and substituting a difficult judgment for an easier judgment.

I should stress that I meant rationally ignorant, in the context of Ilya Somin’s work. Here is the complete paragraph from the paper:

We suspect the theory of political ignorance, combined with the substitution heuristic, are also at play. Kahneman explains that people rely on the substitution heuristic when they are asked to make a tough judgment: “they substitute an evaluation of the evidence, without noticing that the question they answer is not the one they were asked. This process is guaranteed to generate predictions that are systematically biased; they completely ignore regression to the mean.”[1]  To put this into context, when people consider Manchin-Toomey, a universal background check bill that specifically does not provide for registration, they substitute that more difficult-to-assess provision with a simpler one: background checks that lead to registration. Even though they may support background checks in the abstract (as the data supports), they oppose a non-existent bill that does more. Here opponents of the law are being ignorant, and substituting a difficult judgment for an easier judgment. As Professor Ilya Somin explains in his book, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, “the main informational barriers to majoritarian control of legislation on specific issues are the facts that (1) much legislation is completely unknown to most citizens and (2) even when this is not the case, the effects of much legislation are often sufficiently complex that voters cannot readily tell whether the legislation in question will advance their values and interests or not.[2] But this theory also only explains part of the defeat of Manchin-Toomey.



[1] Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow 188 (2012).

[2] Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter 159-160 (2013).

For most people, it is not worth the time and effort to learn about the specifics of laws. It is much easier to simply substitute a bill that’s easy to understand (registration) from a bill that is hard to understand (Machin-Toomey). “Ignorant” usually carrie a pejorative connotation, which I did not intend (and how the excerpt suggests). But in political theory, rational ignorance is more natural, and not pejorative.

Update: Many thanks to Jacob for tweaking the end of the post.

Writes Mr. Blackman:

When people consider Manchin-Toomey, a universal background check bill that specifically does not provide for registration, they substitute that more difficult-to-assess provision with a simpler one: background checks that lead to registration. Even though they may support background checks in the abstract (as the data supports), they oppose a non-existent bill that does more.

He says “opponents of the law are being ignorant, and substituting a difficult judgment for an easier judgment.” For many people, he says, “it is not worth the time and effort to learn about the specifics of laws.”