Study Claims Stricter Gun Laws Reduce School Shootings

It’s Monday, which means it’s time for yet another study that purports to show how gun laws are good, gun rights are bad, and no matter what the Second Amendment says, we should throw it all out the window and do what our betters think we should do.

Some things never really change, do they?

However, it’s important we look at these studies and discuss them, because if we don’t, someone else will bring them up and present them as if they’re unassailable facts.

And we at least know what’s wrong with these studies.

This one claims that restrictive gun laws reduce school shootings, but as per usual, there are some issues.

Let’s start with the study itself.

This study uses a longitudinal state-year panel design covering all 50 U.S. states from 2000 to 2019 to examine whether variation in firearm policy environments is associated with changes in school shooting incidence. This design allows us to analyze within-state change over time while accounting for all stable (time-invariant) differences between states that might otherwise confound cross-sectional comparisons. This analytical approach follows established methodological standards for evaluating the impacts of firearm policy using panel data, particularly when studying low-frequency but high-impact events such as school shootings, mass shootings, and police shootings (Rogna & Nguyen, 2022; Siegel, 2020; Tiderman et al., 2023).

Dependent Variable

Our dependent variable is the count of K-12 school shootings per state-year from 2000 to 2019. We draw on the K-12 School Shooting Database (K-12 SSDB),² which employs a deliberately inclusive definition of a school shooting: any instance in which a gun is “brandished (pointed at a person with intent), fired, or a bullet strikes school property, regardless of the number of victims, time of day, day of week, or underlying motive” (Riedman, 2025). This broad operationalization encompasses incidents ranging from single firearm discharges to mass casualty events, providing a comprehensive measure of gun violence in educational settings. As noted earlier, this means our outcome is not subject to the arbitrary thresholds that typically define a mass shooting; for example, the Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as “a minimum of four victims shot, not including any shooter” (Gun Violence Archive, n.d.). Rather, we capture all gun incidents at schools. We thus have 1000 total observations (20 years across 50 states), with 41.5% of these state-years having non-zero counts.

Using the K-12 School Shooting Database? That’s sketchy as hell, in my opinion. One of the authors, on his Substack, acknowledges that about 10% of the reports this site uses aren’t during school hours or during a school-related activity, just school property. That’s part of it, but a lot of the other instances include things like football or basketball games, which are open to the public, which increases the number of people and therefore, the number of potential offenders.

The results of the study are a bit long-winded, so I’ll turn to one of the author’s Substack again for a more succinct description.

States that implement more restrictive firearm laws experienced significantly fewer school shootings in subsequent years. These results held after adjusting for population size, economic inequality, and the underlying prevalence of household firearm ownership.

Contrary to the ‘armed society is a polite society myth’, we find no evidence that any category of restrictive firearm legislation is associated with increases in school shootings. Our findings offer no empirical support for deterrence-based claims that expanded gun access in the hands of teachers, staff, or civilians prevent firearm violence at schools. Our results are consistent with the expectation that firearm legislation should function as an effective harm-reduction strategy.

Of course, this same author notes some obvious limitations.

Like any study, we also have several limitations. School shootings remain relatively rare events and some firearm policies were adopted by only a small number of states which means there is limited statistical power in our data analysis. By looking back at data from 2000-2019, our study is observational and cannot establish causal mechanisms. A true experiment can establish causation by randomly assigning subjects to treatment vs. control groups to isolate the effect of a single variable. Since we can’t pass state laws to create a control group, our observational study can only identify correlation.

However, I have deeper concerns than just that.

For one thing, this study somehow found that a permit-to-purchase requirement correlated with a reduction in school shootings. Considering that it doesn’t stop anyone from purchasing a gun, only adding another layer to the process of gun ownership, I fail to see any mechanism that would result in fewer students gaining access to a firearm and taking it to school, nor any that would keep bad actors of legal age to own a gun from acting similarly.

In other words, how in the hell does a permit-to-purchase actually stop criminals from doing criminal things when we know they’re not getting guns at gun stores?

Similarly, how does an assault weapon ban reduce kids bringing guns to school when most are bringing handguns?

The study doesn’t try to get into that. In part, that’s fair, because they’re just looking for a connection, not causation. On the other hand, though, if you’re going to claim that we should totally give up our rights because you say the study shows gun control prevents school shootings, you’d damn well be prepared to explain yourself better than just “because we said so.”

Especially considering just how many past studies have also turned out to be absolute garbage and how literally nothing seems to come up with a pro-gun outcome, which is statistically improbable, at best. 

Conveniently, that never comes with anything akin to actual proof.

RAND, which is a left-leaning think tank, looks at studies supporting gun control each year, then looks at how seriously we should take them. So far, even they are forced to acknowledge there’s no strong evidence of gun control working at any level, despite this particular bit of “research” claiming that it does.

Color me skeptical, as per usual.

Editor’s Note: Academia continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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