On a recent episode of Stanford Legal, podcast host Professor Diego Zambrano sat down with Professor John Donohue, one of the country’s leading experts on the empirical study of law and public policy, and Eric Baldwin, a research fellow at Stanford Law, to examine a grim reality in connection with guns: mass shootings have become more frequent, but meaningful reform rarely follows. Against the backdrop of rising political violence, their conversation probed the sometimes-surprising role of campaign donations and interest-group maneuvering in shaping what legislators do—or fail to do—after a mass shooting tragedy. 

Drawing on their research paper “Another Shooting, Another Contribution From the Gun Lobby,” co-authored with Stanford Law graduate student Takuma Iwasaki, Donohue and Baldwin reveal how both gun rights and gun safety PACs flood competitive districts with donations in the wake of deadly shootings. The result, they say, is a high-stakes stalemate that helps preserve the status quo, despite overwhelming public support for measures like universal background checks.

With Donohue’s decades of scholarship on crime and policy and Baldwin’s insights into political science and lobbying, the podcast offered a timely look at how money and ideology shape one of the country’s most polarizing debates.

The following is an edited and shortened version of the full podcast transcript, which can be found here. 

Diego Zambrano: Can you start by giving us a quick overview of how listeners should think about mass shootings within the broader landscape of gun violence?

John Donohue: Over the last 30 years, we have seen a pretty sharp downturn in overall violent crime, and yet one area where things are definitely moving in the wrong direction has been the rise of mass shootings. And everyone’s familiar with the most egregious ones going back to Sandy Hook in 2012, to more recent ones like Uvalde and the Parkland shooting. But the problem is unfortunately moving in the wrong direction from a public policy perspective. There are things that we can do to address this issue; however, what is interesting is that even though the public strongly supports some regulatory measures that could impact this problem, there has been virtual stasis at the federal level over the last 30 years.

Diego Zambrano: Is the U.S. an outlier? Can you just give us an idea of the basic statistics compared to other wealthy countries?

John Donohue: Unfortunately you do see these types of mass shootings everywhere, but first of all, other countries take measures, which have been effective, to stop them when they happen. For example, Australia actually had a worse mass shooting problem 40 years ago than we had on a per capita basis, but after a really horrendous mass shooting where I think 37 people were killed in Port Arthur, Australia, 12 days later, they enacted extremely stringent measures to address that problem. And it basically ended their mass shooting problem.

And around the affluent world, there have been much more restrictive measures taken—far beyond anything that’s happened in the United States.  

Diego Zambrano: What about the power of lobbying generally? And before we get into the question of the gun lobby, what is your understanding of the current literature on how lobbying affects political voting and how legislatures behave?

Eric Baldwin: There is plenty of evidence in the political science literature showing that lobbying is alive and well in the United States, and particularly in state legislatures. What we see, in fact, is that after large-scale mass shootings in states that have legislatures controlled by the Republicans, there’s actually an influx of new bills to reduce gun regulation. And in states in which Democrats have control of the legislative chambers, we see a very modest increase in the introduction of bills, but a null effect in terms of the number that are enacted. So, the Democratic-controlled states are not successful in implementing gun regulation, whereas conservative states are successful in implementing bills that reduce gun regulation.

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Diego Zambrano: Tell us a bit about the landscape of the gun lobby specifically. 

John Donohue: In general, over a long period of time, people thought of the National Rifle Association as the single, major player in this space. But over time, for a variety of reasons, the National Rifle Association has had their problems and their declining influence has been replaced by a large number of other entities trying to take over in this space, such as Gun Owners of America and other groups. In our work, we look at the full array of PACs that make contributions either for gun interests or for gun safety legislation.

Eric Baldwin:  The NRA is typically the interest group that has the most cultural cachet, the one that we most identify with the gun lobby. But, as John was saying, they have faced so many aggressive legal problems in recent years that their spending ability, in terms of campaign contributions, has been significantly reduced, despite the fact that they are still the ceremonial figurehead of the gun lobby.

It’s these other groups that are more opaque and less well known to the American public: Gun Owners of America, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, Smith and Wesson has a political action committee, and a variety of others. The NRA takes a back seat in terms of spending right now. Not that they don’t spend, they just spend less than they have historically.

Diego Zambrano: Let’s talk about your paper and the findings. Give us the headline, what you studied, what you found, and the key takeaways.

John Donohue: I give credit to Eric and Takuma for coming up with the idea of looking into this particular area to answer a question that I’ve long struggled with, which is, why, in the wake of so many horrific mass shootings, has there been no effort to respond to them, even though the public overwhelmingly supports many gun safety regulatory measures? Why in the wake of a presumably democratic nation has there been a failure to respond to overwhelming public support for certain regulatory measures?

And what we see is that there are a number of steps that are taken by the gun lobby and their PACs. It was interesting to see the types of events that they responded to, and one presumes that if they respond by contributing to various congressional candidates, it’s a sign that they’re nervous that their interests will be undermined if they don’t engage in this spending. What we found is that mass shootings in general did not stimulate spending, and even school shootings in general did not stimulate spending. But if a student died at a school shooting, that was enough to engage the interest of the gun lobby. And that’s when they started to substantially increase their spending. 

And of course, the spending was very targeted. They focus on areas where these mass shootings occurred, and only in competitive districts where there was really a risk that a candidate might act in a way that was counter to their interests.

At one point in this country, we did have an assault weapons ban, from 1994 to 2004. When the law originally passed, the gun lobby was unsuccessful in stopping its adoption, but they were powerful enough that they could put a 10-year sunset provision on it. When George W. Bush was running for president, he said he would support reenactment of the federal assault weapon ban. But the pressure from the gun lobby was enough to persuade him to allow it to lapse. So we’ve moved in the wrong direction from where we were and my own work has interestingly shown that if you look at states that do have assault weapons bans and restrictions on high capacity magazines, and also look at the period when we had it nationally, those were periods of reduced deaths from mass shootings and overall injuries as well.

But even broader: Something like 92% of Americans and, 80% of NRA members support things like universal background checks to keep criminals and severely mentally ill individuals from purchasing guns and yet, Congress doesn’t act.

For me, this really is a puzzle. What measures can you imagine that have upwards of 90% support and Congress is simply unable to act? I was surprised and interested to see that overall mass shootings didn’t bring out the gun lobby reaction as powerfully as deaths occurring in school shootings. So that seemed to at least suggest that in their mind, that was something that could motivate the American public.

Diego Zambrano: But why shouldn’t I expect groups that are committed to gun rights to behave like this strategically? They know that the media is going to cover mass shootings that result in deaths. The media doesn’t pay as much  attention to mass shootings that don’t result in deaths, and so the groups know that they should only donate to help their politicians when there is actually a mass shooting that results in deaths. Why shouldn’t we expect that?

Eric Baldwin: One of the things that we have found in recent months, as our research has evolved, is that, in part, they’re responding to other interest groups—the other side of the debate, the gun control lobby, or gun safety PACs as they are sometimes referred to, who are also stepping up their spending. Especially after the Parkland shooting in 2018, we see a variety of groups on the opposite side of the debate, including Everytown, Giffords, Brady, United, who are significantly increasing their spending in those same competitive districts. And as you said, the pro-gun groups feel that this is an important constitutional issue, that citizens have a right to bear arms, and that it is their duty to protect people’s right to exercise their constitutional right. So they want to counteract any effect that the gun control lobby is having in these districts to convince people to push their representatives to enact gun regulation, or to even vote for people who might support that down the road.

One of the interesting things that we found is that with this huge surge of money is flooding these districts from both sides, where both sides are trying to get the upper hand, the money essentially cancels out the other side and it has no material impact on the outcome of the election.

But then interestingly enough, in non-competitive districts, if one side or the other increases their contributions—which is rare—but if they do, they can change the outcome of the election. But in the most competitive, where they feel on the one hand, the pro-gun groups feel that their agenda is vulnerable and the gun safety groups feel that there is a window of opportunity to enact gun regulation, they actually are just reaching a stalemate in the end.

Diego Zambrano: So, the pro-gun control groups also engage in this kind of “flooding the zone?”

Eric Baldwin: Yes, absolutely. Prior to 2018, we find that the gun safety PACs are far less active. Gun rights was a very one-sided topic, in which the gun lobby dominated in terms of spending, and also culturally. But since 2018, the gun control side has dramatically increased its spending by roughly 20% on average after school shootings in competitive districts. But when those school shootings happen within two months of a congressional election, they increase the spending by nearly 4000%.

Diego Zambrano: The alternative explanation to money is ideological commitment, right? You have a really committed minority of voters, perhaps a small minority, who vote on just this issue of gun rights, and they will punish with their vote the legislators who attempt to pass gun control. So, it’s not just about the money necessarily, but about this ideological zeal. The vast majority of voters are not actually voting in any given election. While they would support common sense gun control reforms, they don’t vote on that question. Are they both important, the money and the ideological zeal?

John Donohue: Both are operating at the same time. Again, I would note that few people really think that a universal background check would violate the Second Amendment, except, perhaps the most extreme zealots. And a high percentage of even NRA members support adoption of universal background checks. That shows you it’s not simply a zealous belief in a constitutional amendment. There’s something else driving it. And I would suggest that it almost certainly is the economic interest of gun sellers and manufacturers because the one thing that you can count on is if the NRA membership wants something and gun sellers think it’s going to reduce gun sales, we see the gun sellers win out, not the NRA membership win out. It’s that economic interest that is really the ultimate power here in pushing for contributions and ultimately blocking legislative action.

Diego Zambrano: John, give us an idea of how we should move forward in reaction to both mass shootings but also gun violence generally in the U.S.

John Donohue: I’ve been concerned with the increase in mass shootings over time and of course a lot of that is driven just by the increasing lethality of weaponry. If you look back to the time when there was an assassination attempt on President Reagan, the shooter there, John Hinkley, was using a six shooter, a revolver, and he managed to shoot six bullets, hit four people, and no one died.

Today, the weapon that he likely would be using would be a much more powerful weapon, potentially with a 15- or 17-round magazine. If you’re shooting 15 or 17 bullets rather than just six, you’re obviously going to hit more people. And the lethality of this weaponry is significantly greater. The more powerful the weapon and the bullet size that hit you, the greater the likelihood that you will die from being shot.

So, it’s a growing problem and of course the industry is trying to do what Apple did for the iPhone, which is to every year come up with a faster-shooting and more lethal weapon so that people will go out and make additional purchases.

It used to be that there would be a family gun that would be in the family for decades. Now, every year the industry wants to come up with new bells and whistles, so people will buy new guns. I do think at some point, people will step in—maybe now that there is this rise in political violence we’ve seen with legislators attacked and killed in Minnesota, the attempt on President Trump’s life, and the killing of Charlie Kirk—people may focus on this problem and to adopt some of the commonsense measures that can reduce the level of gun violence in this arena.

Diego Zambrano: We should take a moment to say that this discussion was scheduled before the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk, and we did not intend to discuss political violence, per se. But this is a really dangerous moment for the country and it really underlines the importance of commonsense gun regulations. So, what would you propose in the context of lobbying? Do you think there should be further limits, or do you have any other proposals of how you’d like to see the law develop in this area?

Eric Baldwin: One thing that we’ve been talking a lot about in our meetings and with other members of the public is that the gun safety side, while they have been increasing spending, and they have this stalemate, it’s a stalemate that benefits the gun lobby because it maintains the status quo. And so if enough Americans were to support the gun safety PACs and to put their money where their mouths are, the gun safety PACs could outspend the gun lobby and effectively try to tip some of the most competitive districts and perhaps shift majorities, both at the federal and state level. One thing that we’ll be exploring more in the coming months is the effect of this type of lobbying on both sides of the debate in state houses, specifically because a lot of gun legislation can take place at the state level.

If, in fact, the gun safety PACs can outspend and outmaneuver the gun lobby in moderately competitive, and not just the most competitive districts, perhaps we can see some shifts in legislation in the future and greater gun regulation at both the state and federal level.

John Donohue: Also, you see actions by many politicians today who are trying to leverage the fear of crime as a vehicle to stop any efforts towards gun safety regulation. For example, President Trump has frequently said the murder rate is higher than it’s ever been, even though that’s completely not true. But the idea is if you can scare people enough to think, “you better go out and buy a gun,” that achieves the goals of the gun lobby as well. So, it’s an unfortunate time where a lot of misinformation is capturing the attention of the public.

One thing that I think is very important is much greater awareness of the facts about crime, rather than demagoguing about crime for either economic or political advantage.

John J. Donohue III has been one of the leading empirical researchers in the legal academy over the past 30 years. Professor Donohue is an economist as well as a lawyer and is well known for using empirical analysis to determine the impact of law and public policy in a wide range of areas, including civil rights and antidiscrimination law, employment discrimination, criminal justice and the death penalty, and factors influencing crime, such as guns, incarceration, policing, and legalized abortion.

Professor Diego A. Zambrano’s primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of civil procedure, transnational litigation, and judicial federalism. His work explores the civil litigation landscape: the institutions, norms, and incentives that influence litigant and judicial behavior. He also has an interest in comparative constitutional law and legal developments related to Latin America. Professor Zambrano is the Associate Dean for Global Programs and faculty director of the Neukom Center for the Rule of Law. In 2021, Professor Zambrano received the Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Eric A. Baldwin is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford Law School and an emerging voice in the fields of public policy, political science, empirical legal studies and applied microeconomics particularly in the areas of gun policy, campaign finance, and criminal justice reform (indigent defense). Mentored by Professor John J. Donohue III, Dr. Baldwin employs rigorous quantitative methods to analyze the societal impacts of law and policy. His current research explores gun policy and Political Action Committee activity in the United States. He also currently examines collaborative and holistic defense practices, examining how these models influence case outcomes and reduce recidivism.