Study Looks at Economic Impact of School Shootings

School shootings encompass a lot of things. From a targeted shooting to something like Uvalde, they can range from no one even being injured to dozens killed. They’re all traumatic for the students, but they’re not all the same.

Still, there’s often some degree of impact from these incidents, particularly the ones that are closer to the Uvalde end of the spectrum, that go beyond the psychological and/or physical trauma of the people who were there.

A recent study decided to take a look at the economic impact of such shootings.

The first large-scale empirical evidence that fatal school shootings can impact routine consumption behaviors like grocery shopping and dining out, “How Fatal School Shootings Impact a Community’s Consumption” is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research from John Costello, assistant professor of marketing at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

Costello, along with his co-authors from Indiana University, the University of California-Davis, Georgia Institute of Technology and Texas A&M University, analyzed household grocery purchases from 63 fatal school shootings between 2012 and 2019, matching NielsenIQ’s Homescan market research to school shooting records from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security.

They noticed a measurable decline in consumer activity for up to six months in communities following a fatal school shooting. The authors found reductions in spending of over two percent at grocery stores, eight percent in restaurants and bars, and three percent in overall food and beverage retailers.

“Our controlled experiments provide evidence that this decrease primarily is driven by heightened anxiety about safety in public spaces following these tragedies,” Costello said. Consistent with this, the team’s grocery data shows that consumers not only decrease spending following these incidents, but also the number of grocery trips. The authors find that consumers also purchase from fewer departments, potentially to limit time spent in public settings based on their feelings of anxiety.

And the economic impact is stronger in liberal rather than conservative-leaning counties.

In liberal-leaning counties, grocery spending dropped by 2.4 percent, compared to 1.3 percent for their conservative counterparts. Consistent with the grocery data, findings in the authors’ experiments uncovered that political liberals reported higher levels of anxiety and greater intentions to avoid public spaces following these events.

I’d argue that the issue here isn’t the shootings so much as the media coverage of the shootings.

In the aftermath of these horrific incidents, the media doesn’t just talk about what happened. That’s often bad enough and would likely create as least some anxiety on its own. Instead, though, the news covers not just this, but school shootings nationally as mass shootings as a whole. They cite material from places like the Gun Violence Archive, which inflates the number of mass shootings in such a way that it makes the problem seem far worse than it is.

So, some people stay home.

Plus, in the wake of something like this, there’s the additional effect of people not necessarily feeling right entertaining. People spend more on groceries, for example, if they’re going to have a bunch of people over. If they opt not to entertain, they won’t buy as much. Likewise, people aren’t as likely to go to bars and restaurants, not just due to some anxiety, but simply because it feels wrong to “celebrate” or anything in the wake of an awful tragedy in town.

But something people need to remember is that school shootings aren’t very common, no matter what the media tries to say. In fact, a student is 200 times more likely to be the victim of sexual misconduct at the hands of a teacher than to experience a school shooting. That means there are bigger and far more likely concerns than school shootings impacting your child’s life and traumatizing them.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough. Instead, the boogieman of shootings gets amplified out of proportion to the issue itself.

Par for the course with the media, really, and now we can see the economic impact of some of that, too.