Giffords Board Member Discovers Shocking Fact About the Politics of Gun Control

Sari Horwitz was an investigative reporter at the Washington Post for decades, but based on her bylines her tenure apparently ended in late 2024. At some point since then Horwitz joined the board of the gun control group Giffords, so she no longer has to pretend to be an unbiased journalist. 

In a new piece at The Atlantic, Horwitz claims that researchers have uncovered what she calls the most “cynical move yet” by pro-Second Amendment groups. 

In the first study of its kind, the authors analyzed 25 years of data, linking campaign-finance records to every fatal K–12 school shooting from 2000 to 2024. They then compared campaign contributions between the districts that did and did not have a school shooting. After school shootings where children died, pro-gun contributions to candidates in competitive congressional districts increased on average by more than 30 percent. And when the shooting occurred within two months of an election, contributions surged by 2,820 percent. “The data shows that the gun lobby saves its political firepower for the moments when public grief is greatest and lawmakers are under the most pressure to act,” Eric A. Baldwin, one of the authors, told me.

This should hardly come as a surprise, and despite Horwitz’s headline, it’s far from cynical. It’s smart politics.

As Baldwin says, the political pressure to support gun control intensifies when there is a school shooting and children are killed. That doesn’t mean that gun control policies suddenly become more worthwhile or effective, but it does mean that the news cycle is full of pro-gun control talking heads demanding “something” be done in response. It makes sense that pro-Second Amendment contributions to candidates in competitive congressional districts would increase when gun control becomes more of an issue in those districts, and that the closer you get to an election, the larger the increase will be. 

Horwitz claims that the study “is a compelling reminder of how far the gun lobby will go to block any efforts to protect our children,” but there’s a big problem with her thesis. As she herself acknowledges, the gun control lobby does the exact same thing. 

Gun-safety PACs also increased their spending in competitive districts after school shootings. But the pro-gun groups were by far the dominant spenders until 2018, the year of the Parkland shooting, which left 17 students and faculty dead at a high school in Florida; at that point, gun-safety groups began to significantly increase their spending, sometimes equaling or even surpassing the spending of the pro-gun groups.

So, Horwitz thinks it’s cynical when pro-Second Amendment groups increase their spending in competitive districts, but not when gun control groups do the same thing. 

It might have taken some time for groups like Everytown, Brady, and Giffords to have adopted this strategy, but they’re now all-in. Horwitz even says that anti-gun groups are sometimes even spending more in these districts than pro-gun groups. Does that make them more cynical? 

Not to Horwitz. 

The Stanford researchers did not find that increased spending by either side after fatal school shootings measurably affected which party actually won a competitive House election. (The districts that the study looked at represent only a subset of the gun lobby’s overall election spending.) Nevertheless, the study shows how pro-gun PACs work to undermine anti-gun feelings in communities suffering from the trauma of children being killed in schools.

That’s one way to frame the study’s findings. Another would be that the study shows how pro-gun control PACs work to exploit these tragedies to push for laws that wouldn’t have prevented them. 

The study’s authors claim that their findings “underscore a gap in democratic accountability” and that pro-Second Amendment campaign contributions are “wielded to blunt electoral responsiveness, providing insight into the inability of Congress to adopt broadly supported gun safety measures.” 

By using language like that, it’s pretty clear the researchers themselves are hardly unbiased. If their study found that the increased spending (by either side) didn’t measurably affect the outcome of these elections, then how can contributions by one side “blunt electoral responsiveness” or stop Congress from adopting gun control measures? 

The bottom line for both the study and Horwitz’s article is that it’s only bad when pro-Second Amendment groups engage in these political tactics. That’s some serious hypocrisy, and a pretty clear indication not to take Horwitz’s advocacy journalism seriously in the future. 

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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