Gun Violence

Most Gun Laws Aren't Backed Up By Evidence. Here's Why.

By Maggie Koerth

Feb. 6, 2023, at 6:00 AM

In the first month of 2023, 25 people lost their lives in four mass shootings in California over just eight days. It’s a grim statistic, made all the more distressing when you consider the fact that California has one of the lowest gun death rates in the entire country. This is what a safe state looks like. 

California also has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country. And in the aftermath of those four mass shootings, new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy — who represents a district in southern California — took the opportunity to poke at the state’s firearms restrictions, saying in a press conference that federal gun control legislation would not be an automatic response to these tragedies because such laws “apparently … did not work in this situation.” 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/tyre-nicholss-murder-finally-make-congress-police-reform-96801092

So, did California’s gun laws succeed at making it one of the safest states … or did they fail to stop a string of mass shootings? Questions about the efficacy of gun laws have gotten easier to answer in recent years as changes to federal policy have helped to bring money and people back to the field of gun violence research. But decades of neglect mean there are still lots of blank spaces — policies that don’t yet have good quality data backing them up. A recent report from the Rand Corporation that reviewed the evidence behind a variety of gun policies found just three that were supported by evidence that met the report’s quality standards.¹ 

That fact, however, doesn’t mean other gun laws don’t work — just that the research proving it doesn’t yet exist. Scientists I spoke to saw it as an “absence of evidence” problem, stemming from long-standing, intentional roadblocks in the path of gun violence research. Even the authors of the Rand report say lawmakers should still be putting policies aimed at preventing gun violence into practice now — regardless of what the science does or doesn’t say.

“I think that the goal of the lawmaker is to pick laws that they have a reasonable hope will be better than the status quo,” said Andrew Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at the Rand Corporation. “And there’s lots of ways of persuading oneself that that may be true, that don’t have to do with appealing to strict scientific evidence.”

California doesn’t just have some of the nation’s strictest gun laws and lowest gun death rates, it’s also maybe the best state to study gun laws in, said Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at University of California, Davis Medical Center. That’s because of both the way the state makes data available to researchers and its willingness to work with researchers to further the science. Wintemute is currently part of a team that is working on a randomized controlled trial of one particular California gun law — an initiative that tracks legal gun owners over time and dispatches authorities to remove their weapons if those people later break a law or develop a condition that would make them ineligible to own guns in the state. 

It’s hard to oversell what a big deal this is. Frequently referred to as the “gold standard” of evidence-based medicine, randomized controlled trials split participants randomly (natch) into groups of people who get the treatment and groups that don’t. Because of that, it’s easier for researchers to figure out if a medication is actually working — or if it just appears to be working because of some other factor the people in the study happen to share. These kinds of studies are crucial, but almost impossible to do with public policy because, after all, how often can you randomly apply a law? 

But California has been willing to try. It took cooperation from many different levels of state leadership, Wintemute said. The government was always going to slowly expand this particular program statewide, but in this case legislators were willing to work with scientists and randomize that expansion across more than 1,000 communities, so that some randomly became part of the program earlier and some later. When the study finally concludes, researchers will be able to compare these two groups and see how joining the program affected gun violence in those places with a high level of confidence. 

Most of the time, however, the scientists who study gun laws aren’t working with the kind of research methodology like this that produces strong results. Morral, along with his Rand colleague, economist Rosanna Smart, have reviewed the vast majority of the research on gun control policies done between 1995 and 2020. Their research synthesis found that a lot of what is out there are cross-sectional studies — observational research that basically just compares gun violence statistics at one point in time in a state that has a specific law to those in a state that doesn’t. That type of study is prone to mixing up correlation and causation, Smart said. There could be lots of reasons why California has lower rates of gun violence than Alabama, but studies like this don’t try to tease apart what’s going on. They end up being interpreted by the public as proof a law works when all they’ve really done is identified differences between states. 

The Rand analysis threw out these kinds of studies and only looks at research that is, at least, quasi-experimental — studies that tracked changes in outcomes over time between comparison groups. Even then, the analysis ranked some studies as lower quality than others, based on factors such as how broadly the results could be applied. For instance, a study that only looked at the effects of minimum age requirements for gun ownership in one state would be ranked lower than a study that looked at those effects in every state where a law like that existed.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-view-crime-gun-violence-issues-fivethirtyeight-88152853

Following these rules, the Rand team found just three policies that have strong evidence supporting outcomes — and two of these are about the negative outcomes of policies that increase gun access. Stand-your-ground laws, which allow gun owners to use deadly force without trying to leave or deescalate a situation, appear to increase firearm homicides. Meanwhile, conceal-carry laws, which allow gun owners to carry a gun in public places, appear to increase the number of all homicides and increase the number of firearm homicides, specifically. The only laws restricting gun ownership that have this level of evidence behind them are child-access prevention laws, which have been shown to reduce firearm suicide, unintentional self-injuries and death, and homicides among young people. 

That makes gun control laws seem flimsy, but it shouldn’t, Morral said. Instead, the lack of evidence ought to be understood as a product of political decisions that have taken the already challenging job of social science and made it even harder. The Dickey Amendment, first attached to the 1996 omnibus spending bill, for example, famously prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding gun violence studies for decades. A new interpretation of that amendment in 2018 changed that, but Dickey wasn’t the only thing making it hard to study gun violence. 

Instead, the researchers told me, the biggest impediment to demonstrating whether gun control policies work is the way politicians have intentionally blocked access to the data that would be necessary to do that research. 

“So for instance, the federal government has this massive, great survey of behavioral risk indicators that they do every year in every state,” Morral said. “And you can get fantastic information on Americans’ fruit juice consumption as a risk factor for diabetes. But you can’t get whether or not they own guns.” Not knowing gun ownership rates at the state level makes it hard to evaluate causality of some gun control policies, he explained. “And it’s not because anyone thinks [gun ownership] is not a risk factor for various outcomes. It’s because it’s guns.”

The missing data problem also includes the 2003 Tiahrt Amendment that prevents the sharing of data tracing the origins of guns used in crimes with researchers, said Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University. “So now all we can see are these sort of aggregate-level state statistics,” she said. “We can no longer look at things like, when a gun is recovered in a crime, was the purchaser the same person who was in possession of the gun at the time of the crime?” 

Recently, researchers have even been missing basic crime data that used to be reported by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program. Law enforcement agencies and states were supposed to be shifting to the relatively new, much more detailed National Incident-Based Reporting System, but the transition has been a catastrophe, with some of the biggest law enforcement agencies in the country not yet making the switch because of financial and logistical complications, Smart said. “The FBI has not been able to report for the last eight quarters whether homicide rates are up or down,” Morral added. 

But much of the data that’s not available at a national level is available in California, Wintemute said. “Unlike researchers in any other state, we have access to individual firearm purchaser records,” he told me — the very data the Tiahrt Amendment blocks at the national level. “We do studies involving 100,000 gun purchasers, individually known to us, and we follow them forward in time to look for evidence of criminal activity or death or whatever the outcome might be that we’re studying,” Wintemute said. 

Unfortunately, because the data is only available in California, the results of those studies would only be applicable to California — making it data that wouldn’t be considered high-quality in the Rand report. Wintemute can demonstrate if a policy is working in his home state, but not whether it works in a big, broad, existential sense. It wouldn’t count towards expanding the number of policies Rand has found evidence to support. This is something researchers like Crifasi see as a flaw in the Rand analysis, but it’s also a reason why Morral and Smart don’t think evidence-based policy is a good standard to apply to gun control to begin with. 

It’s useful to know what there is evidence to support, Morral said. “But we don’t at all believe that legislation should rest on strong scientific evidence,” he said. Instead, the researchers from Rand described scientific evidence as a luxury that legislators don’t yet have. 

“There’s always gonna be somebody who’s the first person to implement the law,” said Smart. “And they’re going to have to derive their decision based on theory and other considerations that are not empirical scientific evidence.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/supreme-courts-gun-ruling-remakes-gun-control-americans-85660014

2022 Election

How Democrats And Republicans Think Differently About Crime And Gun Violence

By Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong and Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong

Graphics by Humera Lodhi

Aug. 10, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This article is part of our America's Issues series.

Devastating mass shootings, one after another. Gun reform legislation for the first time in decades. Violent crime up since 2019. Debates over whether to fund or defund police. For the better part of two years now, crime and gun violence have consistently been in the news and on the minds of Americans, which is why we’re taking a closer look at the topic in the fourth installment of our FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos survey.

As a single combined issue, “crime or gun violence” has consistently ranked as a top concern in our survey. We’ve asked the same 2,000 or so Americans since late April using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel about what they think are the country’s most important issues, and in our latest wave, 33 percent of the 1,538 adults who responded named crime or gun violence as a top issue facing the country, making it the second-most important topic of the 20 we asked about.²

Only “inflation or increasing costs” has surpassed crime or gun violence in our poll,  undoubtedly because the country is dealing with the highest inflation since the early 1980s. But even before the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school, Americans ranked crime or gun violence as the third-most important issue facing the country.

That said, not everyone in our survey is prioritizing the issue in the same way. Democrats are more likely to cite it as a problem than either independents³ or Republicans. In the latest wave of our survey, 44 percent of Democrats named it as a top issue for the country, compared with 31 percent of independents and 26 percent of Republicans. Moreover, Democrats have ranked it either first or second in every wave of our poll, while independents have placed it consistently in their top three issues and Republicans in their top six.

Part of what we’re seeing here is that different people fixate on different aspects of crime or gun violence. “Looting, stealing, trying to hack computers, always looking to take from others,” said a 77-year old man from New York who identified as a Republican and homed in on acts of thievery. Meanwhile, a 37-year old woman from Minnesota who identified as a Democrat focused more on gun violence. “I’m much more afraid of the mass shooting epidemic in this country than of any random acts of crime,” she said.

It’s why we tried to dig deeper in this survey to better understand how people think about crime and gun violence. Do they think about them separately, for instance? To help answer this, we asked respondents to rank a list of 12 words or phrases by how much they associated each with either “crime” or “gun violence.” And as the chart below shows, we found people tended to associate “shooting” and “murder” strongly with gun violence, whereas there wasn’t as clear a pattern for which words they associated most with crime. Forty to 70 percent ranked “shooting,” “murder” and “firearm” in the top three words associated with gun violence, while 35 percent to 48 percent put “robbery,” “murder,” “burglary,” “shooting” and “assault” among their top three for crime. Some Americans also associated gun violence more with mental well-being, as 18 percent placed “mental health” in their top-three phrases for gun violence.⁴

In addition to asking respondents which words or phrases they associated with crime or gun violence, we also asked which of the two they thought was a bigger issue facing the country.⁵ Among those who named crime or gun violence as a top issue, 77 percent picked gun violence as the “bigger issue,” compared with only 21 percent who chose crime. This was also true among all respondents, although the gap was less lopsided: Fifty-five percent chose gun violence, and 34 percent named crime.

However, despite the greater concern over gun violence, independents were pretty split on how they viewed the issue, siding more with Democrats on the importance of gun violence as a major issue and more with Republicans on the question of how best to address crime.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-view-crime-gun-violence-issues-fivethirtyeight-88152853

And 56 percent of independents said gun violence was the bigger issue, compared with 29 percent who said crime. “Just look at the rest of the world mocking ‘Americans and their guns.’ We’re killing ourselves. I don't want to fear everyday places: school, grocery, church, the mall, a parade,” said a 46-year old woman from California who identified as an independent who leaned Republican. Similarly, when asked whether they preferred gun laws that were more strict, less strict or upheld the status quo, 60 percent of independents said they supported more restrictions, which was about halfway between where Democrats (87 percent) and Republicans (35 percent) stood on this question (61 percent overall preferred stricter regulations).

That said, a majority of independents sided with Republicans on the question of how to best spend resources to address crime. Fifty-five percent of independents said increasing police funding would reduce crime, while 38 percent favored redirecting some police spending to social services instead. This majority view among independents was still less pronounced than among Republicans, 83 percent of whom supported increasing police spending, while only a minority of Democrats (36 percent) thought increasing police spending would reduce crime.

Overall, though, crime or gun violence was an issue that Americans had seen a lot of in the news. Sixty-seven percent said they’d seen “a lot” of coverage in the past month, which was bested by only inflation (68 percent).⁶ Eddie Ellison, a Black man from Georgia who identified as an independent, told us, “Everywhere, every time you turn the news on, all you see is gun violence, murders and robberies and stuff like this.” 

It’s perhaps one reason why Americans’ understanding of crime and gun violence was pretty accurate. For instance, we found that 60 percent knew that the U.S. has the highest number of gun deaths per capita among all developed countries. The same percentage correctly identified that the number of active shooter incidents has changed over the last 20 years (it’s increased). Additionally, 51 percent correctly said that violent crime, such as murder and rape, increased in 2020, the last year for which we have data, while only 9 percent incorrectly said it hadn’t (38 percent said they didn’t know).

That said, Americans also overstated the rate of violent crime and property crime compared to the past, probably in part because we tend to forget about things that haven’t happened recently. Indeed, 49 percent said the rate of violent crime was higher in 2020 than in 1991 — it wasn’t — while 41 percent said the rate of crimes like burglary and car theft hadn’t been declining since 2010, when, in fact, it has. These weren’t meant to be “gotcha” questions, mind you. Instead, we wanted to get a sense of how levels of concern compared to the actual data on crime and gun violence.

On the subject of policy ideas Americans would like to see implemented to potentially reduce gun violence, there was a lot of agreement, however. At least 74 percent backed a host of different requirements, such as safety training before purchasing a gun, universal background checks for all gun sales, a mandatory mental health evaluation before a gun sale and raising the minimum age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21.⁷ 

This was an area of relative bipartisan agreement, too, as majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents supported each of these proposals. “They need to have a better screening process as to who’s able to purchase a gun,” said Stephanie Brown, a Black woman from Virginia who identified as a Democrat. The least popular measure was requiring gun purchasers to prove they would properly store weapons, but 68 percent still backed that proposal, including 53 percent of Republicans. Amalia Williams, a Hispanic woman from Arizona who identified as a Republican, told us the process for buying a gun should be similar to the immigration process in the U.S., where people’s backgrounds are vetted. “They should do something like that with American citizens so that it takes months to get a gun,” she said. 

Yet Americans didn’t necessarily think implementing these policies would be a panacea, or that people shouldn’t be able to own guns. Only a 41 percent plurality thought greater restrictions on gun ownership would reduce mass shootings, while 35 percent disagreed (22 percent said they didn’t know). Meanwhile, half of all respondents agreed that guns were necessary to defend themselves and their property, and 47 percent said all Americans should have the right to own a gun, compared with just 39 percent who disagreed.

Concerns around gun violence could be politically beneficial for Democrats, who along with independents are more likely to name it as a bigger concern than crime. After all, Democrats and independents (and even some Republicans) tend to back certain restrictions on gun purchases, and 3 in 5 Americans broadly said they’d prefer stricter gun laws. However, Republicans led Democrats on the generic ballot in our poll, which asks voters which party they’d back in the race for Congress, 40 percent to 38 percent among likely voters. This marked a very slight shift — within the margin of error — back in the GOP’s direction after Democrats took a 1-point lead a month ago. We’ve seen Democrats continue to gain in FiveThirtyEight’s generic ballot tracker, so this could be a blip, but it’s a reminder that with the larger concerns about the economy — especially inflation — it’s hard to imagine issues like gun violence and crime completely ameliorating the presidential party’s midterm penalty.

Additional reporting by Zoha Qamar. Art direction by Dan Dao. Copy editing by Santul Nerkar. Story editing by Sarah Frostenson.

Mass Shootings

Mass Shootings Can Traumatize People Who Weren’t Even There

By Maggie Koerth

Jun. 9, 2022, at 10:38 AM

At the end of the day on May 24, more than 400 children walked away from Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas as survivors. That single day of grade school will follow them for years, a formative trauma that increases their risks of experiencing depression, missing school days and even earning less money over their lifetimes. Research shows that violence in the classroom harms kids regardless of whether it physically injures them. 

There were also more than 50 million children enrolled at other K-12 schools in the United States that day. Whether they were across town or across the country, many of those children will also have memories of May 24, 2022; sirens, blaring news reports, or the hushed, tense whispers of adults. They know something awful happened to kids just like them. Next year, they’ll do active shooter drills in their own schools and remember that this will be real someday for someone, even if it’s never real for them.

Is that, also, a kind of trauma? 

There is precious little known about how the impacts of school shootings ripple out to children in the rest of the community, state and nation. But there’s plenty of research that suggests the trauma of violence in general probably doesn’t stop at the specific location where it happened. And that, experts told me, means we need to be thinking differently about the damage violence can cause and who is at risk. 

Despite the high-profile nature of school shootings, and mass shootings more broadly, the mental health impacts of these kinds of events have not been widely studied. Five years ago, Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health, co-published a review of research on how mass shootings impact mental health. The 49 peer-reviewed papers he analyzed were mostly focused on what happened to direct survivors — people who were at the site of a mass shooting but left alive. There were only a few that addressed indirect exposure. 

These studies found evidence of trauma even for those who were not in the room or building where a mass shooting happened, though impacts were larger the closer people were to the actual incident. Other factors — such as media exposure, or the amount of time someone spent discussing the shooting with family and friends — also seemed to affect who came away with symptoms of trauma and how severe they were. But the amount of research on this subject was very small and incomplete, and it’s hard to say much with certainty. 

And according to Gaelea that is still true today. “The issue of mental health in community members who are not directly affected… most people in the mental health space think it’s a real issue but there actually has been very little research on it,” he told me. 

More broadly, there’s lots of evidence that, in certain situations, people can have their mental health impacted by traumatic events even if they weren’t personally in physical danger. “We’ve known for 20 years that watching media images of people suffering can, in and of itself, be a trigger for common mood anxiety disorders, things like depression and post-traumatic stress,” Galea said. 

Evidence suggests there are multiple kinds of indirect trauma, said Jennifer Carlson, a professor of sociology, government and public policy at the University of Arizona. Vicarious trauma, she said, is what happens when people like social workers are deeply exposed to the trauma of their clients and feel helpless to prevent those people from experiencing traumatic events. Community trauma, meanwhile, happens when whole populations are collectively traumatized by something that affects everyone on a cultural level, even if some individuals don’t experience it personally. The traumatic impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish community is a good example of this, as is the collective trauma expressed by Black Americans in the wake of the George Floyd murder. 

This knowledge has implications for how we think about the trauma of school shootings, even if we don’t know exactly how school shootings are affecting the mental health of kids nationwide. People who aren’t affected physically by a disaster are often reminded that they have a low risk of experiencing something like that themselves. There are tens of millions of kids enrolled in school every year, but only a little over a hundred a year — if that — become direct victims of a school shooting. The risk is low. 

But that’s the wrong way to think about risk when we know a traumatic event will happen. The number of school shootings every year that involve active shooters are very small — averaging 5 per year between 2021 and 2011, according to the Naval Postgraduate School’s K-12 School Shooting Database. But you have to go back to 1981 to find a year without at least one. School shootings are almost guaranteed to happen every year — we just don’t know to whom, Carlson said. 

And that means the risk of harm isn’t just about the physical likelihood of being shot, it’s also about anticipating a trauma that will happen to someone — maybe even you — and feeling powerless to stop it and at the mercy of chance. “I am a sociologist of crime,” Carlson said. “I’m very much on board with [the idea that] people overestimate their likelihood of victimization.” But this is different, she said. The likelihood of anticipatory trauma can be high even if the risk of injury and death is low. 

Given that, it’s useless to tell people not to be afraid of something like gun violence. It isn’t just about the personal risk of getting shot, Galea said. In 2016, he published an analysis that found the chances of an American knowing a gun violence victim at some point in their lifetime are nearly 100 percent. There’s a greater social burden than the statistics of direct risk can show. 

2022 Election

Over 40 Percent Of Americans Now Rate Gun Violence As A Top Issue

Our latest poll with Ipsos went into the field two days after the shooting in Uvalde.

By Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong and Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong

Jun. 9, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This article is part of our America's Issues series.

There have already been 248 mass shootings this year,⁸ according to the Gun Violence Archive. At this point in 2021, there had been 258 mass shootings; in 2020, 173. Mass shootings are defined by the Gun Violence Archive as incidents in which at least four people — not including the shooter — are injured or killed, and they have been on the rise in recent years.

It is often a select few mass shootings, though, that capture national headlines and spark outrage. Public opinion often shifts in favor of stricter gun laws after high-profile mass shootings, like the one on May 14 that killed 10 people in a racist attack in Buffalo, New York, and the one on May 24 that killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. 

It should be no surprise, then, that the latest FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, which was conducted from May 26 to June 6 and went into the field two days after the shooting in Uvalde, found that concerns regarding gun violence had surged. Using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, we interviewed the same 2,000 or so Americans from our previous survey, and of the 1,691 adults who responded, 42 percent named “crime or gun violence” as one of the most important issues facing the country, up 19 percentage points from the first wave of the poll released in early May.⁹ This was by far the largest increase for any one issue we asked about, putting it behind only “inflation or increasing costs” as Americans’ top concern for the country.

How concerned Americans were about crime and/or gun violence did vary quite a bit by party, though, as Democrats and independents drove much of the shift. A solid majority of Democrats, 58 percent, named the issue as a top concern, up from 33 percent in early May, while 41 percent of independents said the same, up from 19 percent.¹⁰ Republicans also became more worried about crime and/or gun violence, but the uptick was much smaller, going from 19 percent in May to 29 percent now.

We also found a sizable jump in the share of Black and Hispanic Americans who named crime and/or gun violence as one of the biggest issues for the country, which helps explain, in part, the higher degree of concern among Democrats, as Democrats are more racially and ethnically diverse than Republicans. The share of Hispanic Americans who cited the issue more than doubled, growing from 23 percent in May to 61 percent. To a lesser but still significant extent, the share of Black Americans who named gun violence or crime as a top issue also jumped, going from 35 percent in early May to 55 percent in our latest survey. White Americans were also more likely to be worried, but their overall level of concern was comparably lower: Thirty-five percent named the issue as a top worry, up from 19 percent a month ago.

Part of this dramatic shift can be explained by the sheer amount of media attention gun violence received in the days following the shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. In fact, three-fourths of respondents reported having heard “a lot” about crime and/or gun violence in the news, more attention than any other issue we asked about received — even inflation (which around two-thirds said they had heard a lot about).¹¹

But, of course, as we said at the outset, this is often what happens in the wake of a high-profile mass shooting. As a result of heightened media coverage, there is an uptick in concern about gun violence and/or a lot more support for stricter gun laws. However, the spotlight tends to fade over time and shift to other issues, so Americans become less engaged with the issue and support for stricter gun laws reverts to where it once stood. We didn’t ask about support for stricter gun laws in this poll, but we do know that more Americans are worried about gun violence. Even before this survey, it was one of Americans’ top three issues, so we plan to follow up soon with a deeper dive to better understand what’s driving Americans’ concerns around gun violence and/or crime.

Nothing changed quite as much as Americans’ concern around crime and/or gun violence in our poll, but there were a handful of other important changes regarding which issues Americans felt were most pressing for the country. Abortion, for instance, saw the second-largest change on net, likely thanks to increased media coverage of the issue in early May following a leaked draft Supreme Court opinion that suggests the court might be ready to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established the constitutional right to abortion in 1973. Nine percent of respondents in our survey named it as a top issue, up from just 4 percent a month ago. That said, abortion isn’t the issue that Americans in our poll are most worried about.

Rather, that distinction still belongs to inflation. Americans are most worried about inflation, with even more respondents (56 percent) naming it as a concern than in our last survey (52 percent). This was in large part driven by Republicans, as 75 percent cited inflation as a major concern, up from 65 percent a month ago. Independents were also somewhat more likely to name it as a concern, 56 percent now versus 50 percent in May. Roughly 40 percent of Democrats named inflation as a concern, but this barely changed from our previous survey.

Finally, political extremism and polarization remained a top issue overall, ranking third behind inflation and crime/gun violence after ranking second in our last survey. We dug more into this issue, too, and Americans' attitudes around political extremism and polarization in this survey, so we’ll examine those results more in-depth in an article early next week. But as we’ve outlined here, there’s no question that the big, topline finding in our second FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll is that more Americans are concerned about crime and/or gun violence — at least for now.

Just How Far Apart Are The Two Parties On Gun Control?

By Ryan Best, Mary Radcliffe and Kaleigh Rogers

After what feels like a relentless sequence of high-profile mass shootings, Americans are once again debating whether the country needs stronger regulations on guns. Many lawmakers and activists contend that, even in a country as bitterly polarized as the United States, some gun-control measures actually attract wide support — whether Americans actually vote for the measures they say they support is another matter. However, when you compare specific questions by party response, there’s a gap.

Consider background checks. Morning Consult and Politico asked about this gun-control measure in March 2021. How do you think Republicans and Democrats responded?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support requiring background checks for all gun purchasers?0%255075100

Source: Morning Consult/Politico, March 6-8, 2021, among 1,990 registered voters

Guess

That’s pretty close to consensus, but already we can see that even broadly popular measures like background checks aren’t as appealing to some Republican voters as they are to Democratic voters. Let’s take a look at some other measures. In April 2021, the Pew Research Center asked about barring people with mental-health issues from buying guns. How do you think Republicans and Democrats responded?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns?0%255075100

Source: Pew Research Center, April 5-11, 2021, among 5,109 adults

Guess

Again, we see a lot of agreement from both sides of the political spectrum. But this question was a little vague — what does it mean to prevent people from buying guns? And which mental illnesses should be included? An APM Research Lab survey on Extreme Risk Protection Orders tried to go deeper by asking about these so-called “red flag” laws. These laws would allow family members, the police or certain other officials to seek an ERPO, a court order to temporarily take guns away from someone who may harm themselves or others. When asked whether they supported family-initiated ERPOs, how do you think Republicans and Democrats responded?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support allowing a family member to seek a court order to temporarily take away guns if they feel a gun owner may harm themselves or others?0%255075100

Source: APM Research Lab, July 16-21, 2019, among 1,009 U.S. adult residents

Guess

Once again, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans support this kind of measure, though the gap is wider. When asked whether they would support the police initiating such an action, support dropped among both groups, to 78 percent among Democrats and 66 percent among Republicans.

How about a law banning assault weapons, something that Congress passed in 1994 (but let expire 10 years later) and an option that President Biden recently promoted?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor banning assault-style weapons?0%255075100

Source: Pew Research Center, April 5-11, 2021, among 5,109 adults

Guess

While Democratic support remains high, Republican support drops dramatically, even though the previous ban enjoyed some bipartisan support when it passed.

Another proposal that has been floated by politicians is allowing teachers to carry weapons in school. How far apart do you think Republicans and Democrats are in supporting this measure?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in K-12 schools?0%255075100

Source: Pew Research Center, April 5-11, 2021, among 5,109 adults

Guess

While a majority of Republicans support this idea, it’s not nearly as popular with them as some other measures — and it’s clearly unpopular with Democrats.

But getting gun-control laws passed is not just about whether voters support certain measures but also about how passionate voters are that those measures will work. If a voter generally supports a new law but doesn’t think it will actually change much, they may not be as active in supporting it. A 2019 poll by ABC News/The Washington Post asked about this:

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they were “very” or “somewhat” confident that passing stricter gun-control laws would reduce mass shootings in this country?0%255075100

Source: ABC News/The Washington Post, Sept. 2-5, 2019, among 1,003 adults

Guess

However, when asked about improving mental-health monitoring and treatment, Republicans were much more confident that this would reduce mass shootings, even slightly more so than Democrats: 78 percent of Republicans said they were “very” or “somewhat” confident that this would work, and 75 percent of Democrats agreed.

Some differences in thinking about gun control may have to do with whether people own guns themselves.

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they, or anyone in their household, own a gun of any kind?0%255075100

Source: Morning Consult, Feb. 12-13, 2022, among 2,210 adults

Guess

Although most Americans don’t own a gun, a small share own a lot of them, which is why the U.S. has more guns than people.

While both Democrats and Republicans support some gun-control measures, broad support for extensive gun control is its own constitutional knot thanks to the Second Amendment. In April, YouGov/The Economist asked Americans which was more important: the right of people to own guns or protecting people from gun violence. (Respondents could also say if they thought both were equally important.)

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they believe the right of people to own guns is more important than protecting people from gun violence?0%255075100

Source: YouGov/The Economist, April 16-19, 2022, 1,500 U.S. adult citizens

Guess

While a plurality of Republicans (49 percent) said both are equally important and a majority of Democrats (57 percent) said protecting people from violence is more important, the difference is striking. As the country debates how to end mass shootings like the ones that happen in the U.S. every day, this gap may be the most meaningful of all.

Edited by Chadwick Matlin and Jennifer Mason. Art direction by Emily Scherer.

Gun Violence

Suicide Prevention Could Prevent Mass Shootings

By Maggie Koerth

Jun. 6, 2022, at 1:32 PM

The following is an updated version of this article, published in 2019.

Imagine a doctor who wanted to treat a broken leg with chemotherapy. Or treat cancer with a cast.

Just because cancer and broken legs are both things that happen to the body doesn’t mean they call for the same treatment. These are the kinds of issues policymakers face every day. Take gun violence. It feels like one big problem, but it’s actually a bunch of different problems that don’t necessarily have a single cause. But it’s also easy to get so focused on the differences between types of gun violence that we miss the unexpected connections. Just like a fragile, cracked bone could be a symptom of certain kinds of cancers, researchers are finding evidence that suicides and mass shootings can often be different expressions of the same problem.

I first reported on this connection back in 2019, as part of trying to explain why a suicide prevention tool — “red flag laws” that enable family members and law enforcement to determine that a person is a threat to themselves or others and temporarily remove guns from their home — was being proposed as a way to prevent mass shootings. 

Today, 19 states have enacted red flag laws and they’ve had mixed results in violence prevention. But the connections between suicidality and mass shootings have just gotten stronger. “Many of these mass shootings are angry suicides,”  James Densley, professor of criminal justice at Minnesota’s Metropolitan State University, told me four years ago. And now there’s even more evidence to suggest that’s true. 

It isn’t news that a lot of mass shooters suffer from suicidal ideation, said James Lankford, a professor of criminology at the University of Alabama. But it wasn’t until he published a 2021 study comparing mass shooters to other demographic groups that he truly realized just how much more mass shooters had in common with people who die by suicide than they did with other kinds of homicide offenders.

“Homicides are rarely premeditated but public mass shootings almost always are,” Lankford said. So are suicides. While mass shootings were 3.8 times more likely to be premeditated than standard homicides, they were only 1.2 times more likely to premeditated compared to suicide. Mass shooters were more likely than other homicide offenders to act alone. They were more likely to be killed by law enforcement. And while standard homicide offenders aren’t particularly likely to experience suicidal tendencies, in Lankford’s study anyway, mass shooters were a bit more likely to have a history of suicidal ideation than even people who actually died by suicide. 

Lankford is not the first person to find connections between suicide and mass shootings. In a database of more than 150 mass shootings that took place between 1966 and 2018, Densley found that about half the attackers in his sample had demonstrated signs of feeling suicidal before they hurt others. A different set of researchers who analyzed 41 school shooters for the Secret Service and Department of Education found that 78 percent had a history of thinking about or attempting suicide.

“We’ve even talked to a couple of people who tried to kill themselves but failed and then launched an attack because they were hoping police would kill them,” said Marisa Randazzo, a former chief psychologist for the Secret Service who now consults on active threat assessment with schools and other organizations, told me.

A third set of researchers, who compiled the details of 119 lone-actor terrorists, did not specifically track whether the people in their data set had thought about or attempted suicide, but the researchers told me they also found significant overlap between mass shootings and choices that suggested suicidal tendencies. “A fairly sizeable subset only planned this to be a one-off event” — that is, something they didn’t return from — said Paul Gill, a professor of security and crime science at University College London and the researcher in charge of that data set. “They were taking preparations to maximize the chances of death by cop or their own hand.”

In other words, acts of mass violence are functioning as a method of suicide. “These are individuals who are planning in advance to commit a crime for which there’s almost no chance they’ll avoid life imprisonment or death as a direct result of the crime,” Lankford said. “It’s very reasonable to say that they’re not very invested in their current lives, or their future lives.” 

That fact has implications for policy and prevention. 

A connection to suicide means armed guards are unlikely to be a deterrent to mass shooters, Densley said. In 2021, he published a paper that analyzed 133 cases of school shootings between 1980 and 2018 and found that the ones where armed guards were present had a death rate 2.8 times higher than those with no armed guards on scene. Densley thinks this could partly be because in the eyes of a shooter exhibiting suicidal ideation, good guys with guns are a feature, not a bug. They may see a higher chance of death for themselves and they may go in more heavily armed — and more innocent people could be caught in the ensuing shootouts. And even if that’s not the case, Lankford said, a shooter having armed guards to fight creates a story that increases the killer’s chances of achieving notoriety and fame.

The connection to suicide also means potential mass shooters can easily slip under the radar of law enforcement, who are trained to deal with crime, not crisis, Lankford said. It’s not uncommon for future mass shooters to come to the attention of law enforcement before their major attack, but those interactions often go nowhere because that person has no connection to violent crime or gangs, and they have no previous criminal record. “Those questions aren’t useful in assessing the threat of a mass shooter,” he told me. 

And these kinds of shooters remain difficult to profile. Even knowing the connection to suicidality doesn’t particularly help because most suicidal people aren’t a danger to others, just themselves. 

But there is some good news here. Mass shootings are very often preceded by what experts describe as cries for help — shooters tell other people about their plans, they make threats, they describe their desire to kill and be killed. In a 2021 study of 170 perpetrators of mass shootings, researchers found that 44 percent had leaked specific details of their own plans beforehand. Multiple studies have found that family and friends of a mass shooter are often aware that something is wrong long before the violence happens. That happened one-third of the time in Densley’s database, 64 percent in Gill’s, and 81 percent in the cases Randazzo logged.

And this is why many experts who study the epidemiology of mass shooters like the idea of red flag laws as a preventative. Even once you identify some details that many of the attackers have in common, such a large swath of the population shares these traits that the “profile” is fairly useless for prevention. Red flag laws circumvent that problem by focusing less on a type of person and more on a type of emotional and situational crisis — where the people involved aren’t necessarily “bad guys” but troubled individuals in need of help. Gill thinks of it as a public health approach, analogous to the way we treat physical health problems that are hard to profile.

“We know that raised cholesterol leads to heart problems. We don’t have the ability to predict who in the general population who already has raised cholesterol will go on to have a heart attack. So we put in place prevention policies to try to decrease cholesterol in the whole ‘at risk’ community,” he said.

For the researchers who study mass violence, what’s appealing about red flag laws is that these rules have the potential to shift the emphasis from a cut-and-dried checklist of dangerous traits to a more nuanced system that accounts for a person’s big-picture emotional state. 

Right now, experts said, even when friends, family and teachers know something is wrong with a potential shooter, they may not be able to actually do much about it. Sometimes people don’t know who to tell. Sometimes they choose not to tell in order to avoid sending a loved one to prison for crimes they haven’t yet committed. Sometimes the authorities can’t do anything because the nature of the threat doesn’t include illegal behavior.

All these researchers supported red flag laws because they could create a clear plan of action for friends and family concerned about a loved one’s combination of emotional crisis and violent threats. It creates a place to take concerns, a system to evaluate those concerns and a means of mitigating them. That’s particularly true, researchers said, if national red flag laws are set up so that the system isn’t punitive. Ideally, the process would focus on helping a person get through to the other side of an emotional crisis rather than putting them in jail. It’s also important, the researchers said, to make sure the laws are focused on professional evaluations of overall behavior, not checklists.

And there’s some evidence this could work. An analysis of records from California, where one of the first red flag laws was enacted in 2016, found at least 21 cases where the laws had been used specifically because people around a person were worried about their potential to commit a mass shooting. As of 2019, none of those people had followed through on that potential. It’s impossible to know, however, how those risks would have played out if the red flag hadn’t been there. 

But if those parts work together the way they should, then red flag laws really could be a useful tool for combating the segment of mass shootings that function like very public, violent suicides. “There’s an important piece when we interviewed school shooters and active threat cases,” Randazzo said. “They feel very strongly about two things: They have to carry out the violence, they have no options left, but they also don’t want to do it and hope someone will stop them.”

Mass Shootings

Support For Gun Control Will Likely Rise After Uvalde. But History Suggests It Will Fade.

By Geoffrey Skelley, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejia, Geoffrey Skelley, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejia and Geoffrey Skelley, Nathaniel Rakich and Elena Mejia

May 26, 2022, at 12:40 PM

After a racist shooting earlier this month at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and Tuesday’s school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, guns have — yet again — emerged as a political issue that has dominated headlines. Democrats have issued impassioned pleas for the government to more tightly regulate the sale of firearms, and if past shootings are any indication, we will soon get a fresh batch of polling data showing that solid majorities of Americans agree with them. But again, if past shootings are any indication, Congress will not pass any reforms, in large part because many Republicans oppose gun control reform. And as happened so many times before, the strong public support for gun control will fade away with our memories of the shootings.

FiveThirtyEight took a look at polling and media data to show how support for gun laws has increased amid intense media coverage of past school shootings, but then reverted back toward the previous mean as the media spotlight moved on to other issues. We examined the period around two school shootings in 2018 to see how coverage of those events corresponded with changes in support for increased gun control. Specifically, we examined data around the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the May 18, 2018, shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas.¹² And as you can see in the chart below, there was an abrupt increase in the share of Americans who favored stricter gun laws right after each shooting, most especially Parkland, followed by a decline in support.

Following each shooting, there was a huge surge in media attention and, correspondingly, a sharp rise in favorable views toward stricter gun laws. On the day of the Parkland massacre, about 51 percent of Americans told Civiqs they favored greater gun control, while about 42 percent were opposed. A week and a half later, the share who said they favored stricter gun laws had jumped to 58 percent, a significant increase in such a short period of time. In the wake of the Santa Fe shooting three months later, support rose from a little under 53 percent to a notch above 54 percent.

Bombarded by a high volume of terrible images and tragic stories right after a shooting, a small but meaningful number of Americans who opposed stricter gun control moved toward supporting it. For instance, the share of Republicans who favored increased gun restrictions rose from 12 percent to 22 percent in the 10 days following the Parkland shooting, and the share of independents in support rose from 45 percent to 53 percent. The share of Democrats who supported stricter gun laws also increased, from 88 percent to 92 percent. But as coverage tailed off — in the case of Parkland — or practically evaporated — in the case of Santa Fe — the share of Americans who favored stricter gun laws reverted toward the mean. 

This is not to say that news coverage perfectly explains shifts in support for stricter gun control. After all, partisan views on this issue likely reasserted themselves after the initial shock of the school shooting moved public opinion — for instance, the share of Republicans who favored stricter gun laws had almost returned to pre-Parkland levels before the shooting at Santa Fe caused them to shift slightly up again. However, the media does help determine the salience of certain issues by focusing coverage on particular problems facing the country. Simply put, if the media is covering something, Americans are more likely to think about it. Yet as the issue receives less attention, it moves out of the spotlight and something else takes its place.

Even if support for stricter gun laws in the immediate aftermath of mass shootings is inflated, though, it’s clear that Americans still support more gun control overall. A Gallup poll from October 2021 — a survey that was not inspired by a particular mass shooting — found that 52 percent of Americans wanted stricter laws governing gun sales, while only 11 percent wanted less strict laws; 35 percent felt that gun laws should be kept as they were at the time. 

And stricter gun laws have been Americans’ preference for most of the last 30 years. Back in 1990, when Gallup first asked this question, a whopping 78 percent of Americans wanted stricter gun-control laws. That number gradually fell to 43 percent by 2011, putting it in an approximate tie with the share of Americans who were satisfied with U.S. gun regulations. But the next year, in the immediate aftermath of the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, support for more gun-sales restrictions increased to 58 percent, and it has remained around that high ever since — with some temporary spikes in response to major shootings like Parkland.

The trend in public opinion over the last decade offers both good and bad signs for supporters of gun control. On the one hand, Sandy Hook — which is sometimes considered a tipping point that normalized debating gun policy in response to mass shootings — appears to have had a lasting impact on American public opinion on guns. While pro-gun-control sentiment did fade in the months following Sandy Hook, it did not fall all the way back to its 2011 low — instead, the shooting seems to have fundamentally shifted the debate toward more Americans wanting stricter gun laws. On the other hand, though, support for gun control has markedly decreased since the 2019 spike associated with the shootings that summer in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, to a point even lower than the pre-Parkland (2018), pre-Las Vegas (2017), pre-Orlando (2016) baseline. (Civiqs has also picked up on this trend.)

It’s possible that we’re about to see another large spike in support after what happened in Uvalde, but if history is any guide, it won’t last for long.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/2021-texas-laws-made-access-guns-easier-84997294

In March 2020, as the first COVID-19 outbreaks rippled across the U.S., Americans flocked to gun stores. In total, civilians purchased some 19 million firearms over the next nine months — shattering every annual sales record. At the same time, shootings across the country soared, with dozens of cities setting grim records for homicides. 

As the pandemic progressed, and gun sales continued to climb alongside shootings, researchers have puzzled over the connection between these two intersecting trends. Was the surge in violent crime related to the uptick in guns sold last year? We may not get a definitive answer to that question for years, but fresh data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives provides some of the first evidence that a relationship exists.

ATF data shows that in 2020, police recovered almost twice as many guns with a short “time-to-crime” — in this case, guns recovered within a year of their purchase — than in 2019. Law enforcement officials generally view a short time-to-crime as an indicator that a firearm was purchased with criminal intent, since a gun with a narrow window between sale and recovery is less likely to have changed hands. Altogether, more than 87,000 such guns were recovered in 2020, almost double the previous high. And almost 68,000 guns were recovered in 2020 with a time-to-crime of less than seven months (meaning they were less likely to have been purchased the prior year).

Put more plainly, thousands of guns purchased in 2020 were almost immediately used in crimes — some as soon as a day after their sale. That was the case of the 9mm Beretta pistol purchased by an Arlington man from Uncle Dan’s Pawn Shop and Jewelry in Dallas, according to police records. Officers seized the gun from its owner during a drug arrest 24 hours later. In another example, a Laredo, Texas, man assaulted his mother, then opened fire on police with his Smith & Wesson M&P 15-22 rifle in July 2020. The gun had been purchased at a Cabela’s in Ammon, Idaho, just three months prior.

“Overall, I think we can say that the gun sale surge may have contributed to a surge in crime,” said Julia Schleimer, a researcher in the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, after reviewing the ATF’s data. 

But it’s also possible, she added, that the increase in gun sales is not solely responsible for the increase in short time-to-crime recoveries. Schleimer suggested that better use of gun tracing technology by police departments could lead to more short time-to-crime traces, even if the number of guns recovered by law enforcement or sold to the public did not change.

Gun tracing is a process in which police send details about a recovered firearm to the ATF, which then provides information like the weapon’s manufacturer, original retailer, date of purchase and time-to-crime, among other data. As The Trace has previously reported, the ATF has long struggled to convince local law enforcement to trace all of their recovered guns. Compliance has improved significantly over the last decade, but many agencies still fail to trace guns. 

Researchers interviewed for this story cautioned that the number of guns recovered and traced by law enforcement does not always indicate the amount of gun crime in a given year. In other words, factors driving increases in the amount of short-time-crime guns in the ATF's data may be separate from the factors contributing to gun violence.

Still, no sales bump compares to 2020, when gun buying soared to unprecedented heights, Schleimer said, substantially widening the pool of recently purchased guns that could potentially turn up at crime scenes.

As our data shows, the absolute number of recovered and traced guns with a short time-to-crime increased dramatically in 2020. But since sales also surged last year, it’s logical to expect that number to rise as well. It’s helpful, then, to consider whether the rate of recovery of short-time-to-crime guns also increased. Put another way: Did a higher proportion of guns sold in 2020 wind up at crime scenes than in years past? 

The data shows that while the share of short time-to-crime guns recovered and traced relative to total guns sold did increase, the size of the increase was not abnormal. In fact, it continues a trend dating back to 2013. 

Historically, dips and spikes in gun sales have not strongly correlated with the number of recently purchased guns recovered by police in a given year. Daniel Webster, the director of the Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, said that the limited data available suggests gun sales are an imperfect predictor of how many recently purchased guns police will recover: In several of the past 10 years, gun sales spiked without proportional increases in short time-to-crime recoveries; likewise, gun sales frequently dipped while recoveries were on the rise. 

Webster said additional variables are likely contributing to variation in the number of short time-to-crime guns recovered and traced by police. But he noted that since researchers only have access to aggregate trace data, it’s difficult to understand what those variables might be. “Ideally, you’d want to tease apart the crimes committed by those who purchased the guns vs. guns diverted to other people,” he said. Federal law currently restricts the ATF from sharing granular trace data with the public.  

Erik Longnecker, a spokesperson for the ATF, said it would be “inappropriate” for the agency to speculate on what was driving the increase in short time-to-crime recoveries. 

Jim Bueermann, a former California police chief who serves as a senior fellow at the George Mason University Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy, said that while the new data may not provide conclusive evidence of a causal relationship between gun sales and gun crime, it does signal the importance of additional exploration. “Data like this asks more questions than it answers, but this is a clarion call for criminologists to conduct research in this space.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/amendment-didnt-protect-gun-2008-fivethirtyeight-80824464

The research we do have, though, shows that immediate booms in access to firearms almost always lead to corresponding spikes in violence.

Dr. Garen Wintemute, who directs the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, said he wasn’t surprised that the largest increase in access to firearms in history happened alongside a parallel surge in violence.

But so far, his team has struggled to find any causal association. In July, he and Schleimer co-authored a paper that sought to investigate what effect, if any, the pandemic sales boom had on violent crime. It found no relationship. Instead, they concluded that unemployment, economic disparity and physical distancing exacerbated by the pandemic were far more potent predictors of increased violence. The findings square with theories from researchers, violence prevention activists and former perpetrators about the root causes of gun violence.

Wintemute said that his findings should not undercut the significance of the new ATF data. His study only assessed state-level associations, he noted, and was published before the ATF’s release of 2020 time-to-crime data.

“It can be difficult or impossible statistically to sort out the contributions that any one of these [phenomena] made” to the rise in violence, Wintemute said. “But the bottom line is, if the prior research holds up and increases in access are associated with increases in violence, we’re in for a very rough time ahead.”

Daniel Nass contributed reporting.

On a balmy June evening in 2015, a young man with a blunt bowl haircut walked into the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to join a Wednesday night Bible study. As the worshipers closed their eyes in prayer, the man fired at least 70 shots, killing nine people. Among the dead were Ethel Lee Lance, the mother of the Rev. Sharon Risher, and two of Risher’s cousins.

Two years later, on a bright Sunday morning in November, a man in a skull face mask fired some 700 rounds outside and inside the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs, Texas, leaving at least 20 people injured and 26 dead. A pregnant woman, her unborn baby and the 14-year-old daughter of the church’s pastor, Frank Pomeroy, were among those killed.

This is also a tale of two very different responses to tragedy and trauma. 

Both pastors buried their dead, mourned their incalculable losses, read their Bibles, prayed and eventually returned to their ministries. But Risher, a nondenominational Christian pastor, dedicated herself to gun-law reform and reducing access to weapons. Pomeroy, a Southern Baptist, armed and trained his church members and routinely wears his weapon in the pulpit.

“To me, being a follower of Jesus means that I will always advocate for nonviolence,” Risher told me from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina, just a few days after the sixth anniversary of her mother’s murder. “My thinking is, I don’t condemn anyone for owning a gun, but I want people to realize the power of the violence they hold in their hand when they have a gun. And that just because you have a right to own a gun does not mean you have to exercise the right to use it.”

Pomeroy, who has a military background and grew up hunting, sees carrying a gun as an extension of his responsibility to protect his flock. He is both licensed and trained to use a handgun and often carried one before the shooting at his rural church.

“God has endowed some of us with the capability to be a warrior and others not,” he said, sitting at his dining room table during a video interview. “Some are on the frontline, and some are in the supply room. Both are equally important, but they’re gifted in different ways. And that’s why it’s important that we go to the Lord and seek what we’re supposed to do individually. And then if he says, yes, carry that firearm, I have no problem carrying that firearm.”

How did these two Christian leaders come to such opposite conclusions? Both read the same Bible, worship the same God and have suffered unfathomable losses to unspeakable violence at the hands of disturbed individuals who managed to acquire legal firearms. Yet on the issue of guns, there is a gulf between them. And, perhaps what’s most important, Risher’s and Pomeroy’s dividing paths highlight two very different relationships between guns and God in America today.

Americans’ passion for the right to bear arms has a long and well-known history. But the relationship between religion and guns is often obscured by the horror and tragedy of mass shootings like those that terrorized the Charleston and Sutherland Springs congregations. However, activists, scholars and pastors now point to a shift in the relationship between religion and guns, with more people of faith realizing that despite a range of views on the proliferation and use of guns, they have a theological and moral imperative to speak out on the issue. Even so, security-training companies say houses of worship make up the fastest-growing segment of their business as more churches, synagogues, mosques and temples are arming their congregations.

“The cross and the gun give us two really different versions of power,” said Shane Claiborne, a Christian activist and co-author of “Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence.” “One of them says, ‘I’m willing to kill,’ and the other one says, ‘I’m willing to die.’”

Religion’s relationship to guns

As a pastor who owns and carries a gun, Pomeroy is not an outlier. Few studies examine gun ownership and religion, but scholars who have explored the subject see a definite link.

“Religion does matter to gun ownership, but not in any one simplistic way,” said David Yamane, a professor of sociology at Wake Forest University who found that evangelical Protestants were more likely to be gun owners compared with mainline Protestants, members of other religions and people with no religious affiliation. “The connection between gun ownership and religion is different depending on whether you are talking about religious behaving, belonging or believing.”

Yamane found, for instance, that Americans who hold more theologically conservative beliefs are more likely to own guns, but those who are more actively involved with their house of worship’s congregation are less likely to own guns. “These differences are essential to keep in mind if we want to have an accurate understanding of the connection between religion and guns,” he said.

The Pew Research Center found in a 2017 survey that about 4 in 10 white evangelicals own a gun, the highest share of any religious group, and that 74 percent of all gun owners in the U.S. agree with the statement that their right to own a gun is essential to their sense of freedom. Today, only three states and Washington, D.C., prohibit firearms inside places of worship, according to the Giffords Law Center.

Overall, shootings in houses of worship are rare, but they are becoming more frequent. According to a database published by The Washington Post, 95 people have died in a mass shooting at a place of worship in the U.S. since 1966, and more than half of those people were killed in the past five years.¹³ The impetus for these rampages ranged from domestic disputes — the motivation of the Sutherland Springs killer — to religious- or race-based hatred — the Mother Emanuel shooter hoped to start a race war. Meanwhile, FBI data shows a 65 percent increase in hate crimes¹⁴ at churches, synagogues, temples and mosques from 2014 to 2019,¹⁵ while the Faith Based Security Network notes a 60 percent increase in “non-accidental deaths” at houses of worship between 2014 to 2017.

The perpetrators of these shootings have targeted houses of worship indiscriminately. In the past decade, shootings at houses of worship with more than one fatality include:

• Oak Creek, Wisconsin — On Aug. 5, 2012, a man belonging to several white supremacist groups shot and killed six people and wounded four at a Sikh gurdwara. A seventh person died of his injuries in 2020.
• New York City — On Aug. 13, 2016, two people, including an imam, were shot outside a mosque.
• Antioch, Tennessee — On Sept. 24, 2017, a man shot and killed a woman outside Burnette Chapel Church of Christ. He entered the church and wounded at least six others before another worshiper held him at gunpoint until police arrived.
• Pittsburgh — On Oct. 27, 2018, a gunman killed 11 people and wounded six on a Saturday morning, the Jewish sabbath, at the Tree of Life synagogue that housed three  congregations. It is the deadliest shooting at a synagogue in American history.
• Poway, California — On April 27, 2019, a 19-year-old man posted an anti-Semitic screed online before walking into a synagogue on the last day of Passover and shooting and killing one worshiper and wounding three more, including the rabbi.
• White Settlement, Texas — On Dec. 29, 2019, a man shot and killed two worshipers during a morning service at the West Freeway Church of Christ. A member of the church’s security team, licensed to carry, shot and killed the perpetrator. The incident was captured during live video streaming of the service and has been watched on YouTube and Twitter millions of times.

After every shooting, religious leaders appear in the media and call for peace and unity. Some, like Risher, call for “common-sense gun laws,” a term proponents of these measures prefer over “gun control,” which they say has a negative connotation. Others, including the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a member of former President Donald Trump’s faith advisory board, have no problem with their flock bringing guns to church for greater safety.

"I'd say a quarter to a half of our members are concealed-carry — they have guns and I don't think there's anything wrong with that,” Jeffress said on “Fox and Friends” after the Sutherland Springs shooting. “They bring them into the church with them ... if somebody tries that in our church, they might get one shot off or two shots off, and that's the last thing they'll ever do in this life.”

Ryan Burge, a professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and an American Baptist Church pastor who has studied guns and religion, finds that political affiliation is a stronger indication of one’s views on guns than religion is, with Republicans more likely to support less legislation and Democrats in favor of more.

“Gun control is a fascinating issue in American faith, because the data points to a clear conclusion,” he wrote in 2020. “Religious leaders are, by and large, not guiding the views of their congregations on this topic ... Americans of all religious faiths are less supportive of gun control now than at any point in the last two decades.”

On the organizational level, most denominations have made statements against gun violence — and sometimes, against guns themselves — especially after mass shootings. But only the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has ordained a “minister of gun violence prevention,” the Rev. Deanna Hollas, who lives in a religious community outside Dallas.

Hollas felt called to this role when her daughter attended a Texas college that allows students to carry weapons on campus. Now she visits mainline Protestant churches across the country to speak out against gun violence and perform “disarmings” — the dismantling of firearms per Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives guidelines.

“Not everyone is going to lay down their guns,” she said. “But we are going to say there is a different way.”

While Hollas is the only known minister exclusively assigned to work on gun violence, she believes that more people of faith are taking up the issue.

“The good news is people are waking up to this,” she said. “Sight is being restored to the blind. The tools we have been using — that we are going to read and think our way out of gun violence — have not been effective. We are in the process of deconstructing that and realizing that we need to return to spiritual practices and embrace the faith of Jesus instead of the church of empire that we have inherited.”

The violence interrupters

Increasingly, religious leaders in favor of gun reform are framing their argument as anti-violence rather than anti-gun. Among these are Claiborne, the Philadelphia-based leader of Red Letter Christians, a faith-based organization that emphasizes the words of Jesus — which are printed in red letters in some Bibles — to oppose gun violence and other societal ills. Clairborne was raised in a hunting and gun-owning family but now travels the U.S. literally beating surrendered guns into garden tools and other implements.

“We're worshipping the Prince of Peace on Sunday and packing heat on Monday, sometimes even packing heat on Sunday,” he said a few days before traveling to Houston to dismantle guns collected by a local congregation. “Some of our idolatry of individual rights is at the heart of this too.”

Claiborne knows Christians who carry guns and bring them to church — 40 states have no restrictions on doing so. He said he understands Pomeroy’s decision to arm himself and his congregation but added that this doesn’t align with his understanding of the same faith.

“It's very reasonable to do what the pastor at Sutherland Springs did,” he said, noting that he does not know Pomeroy and does not want to judge him. “In fact, it's exactly what [Jesus’ disciple] Peter wanted to do when he picked up a sword to try to defend Jesus, and Jesus says, ‘Put your weapon away.’ For me, as a Christian, there’s no way that I can reconcile Jesus’ call to love our enemy with this idea that we’re going to stand our ground or kill our enemy.”

That is Risher’s conclusion, too. She said she has forgiven her mother’s murderer. “If I did not, it was going to eat me alive,” she said. “And I wanted to live. And I did not want to live as a victim.” Now she travels the country to encourage other people of faith to put down any weapons they may own.

“You know, as a person of faith, I believe prayer moves things,” she said in an interview at Duke Divinity School. “But it takes more than prayers to deal with the things that we have to deal with as a society right now. Yes, God gives us prayer, but he gives us the motivation and the willingness to take action.”

Claiborne’s actions have included organizing a peaceful protest and demonstration outside a Philadelphia gun store. Risher volunteers with Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Catholic priests, Muslim imams, Jewish rabbis and other religious leaders have walked the streets of cities plagued by gun violence in the hope of interrupting the violence.

The Rev. Michael McBride is one of those pastors. As director of the Live Free Campaign, an anti-violence and anti-mass-incarceration activist group, he and a cadre of San Francisco-area clergy routinely walk the streets of Oakland and other Bay Area cities where gun violence is routine. They do not focus on gun legislation, but on actions they hope will “interrupt” the cycle of violence.

“Gun control is one part of the conversation, but too many people in the gun-control community want gun control to be the lion’s share of the conversation,” he said. “I think at best it should be 25 percent of the conversation.”

McBride, who grew up in Hunter’s Point, a hot spot for gun crimes in the Bay Area, came to this work after seeing the results of gun violence up close. “Once you do a dozen funerals … it changed me,” he said. “I asked, ‘Is this the most that I could do?’”

Now his group holds “call-ins” — mediated conversations between gun offenders, faith leaders, crime victims, ER nurses and police — and organizes 12-month programs for gun offenders, or “peace cohorts,” that focus on working them into their communities. Gun-control legislation, he said, rarely comes up as a viable solution to urban gun crimes, especially when he is facing an anguished mother who wants to know why her son or daughter was shot.

The church, McBride said, should be an advocate for “common-sense gun legislation,” but it cannot end there. People of faith must also look at the causes of the violence — income inequality, mass incarceration, mental-health issues and trauma, among them.

“The church has to boldly proclaim the need for healing and peacemaking in our communities,” he said over a diner breakfast before heading to The Way Christian Center, a Berkeley church he and his family have led for three generations. “We have to use our pulpits and platforms to advocate for peace, for policies and programs. We have to scale up intervention to change lives.”

That’s a tall order for anyone, clergy or layperson. Shani Buggs, a professor at University of California, Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program, said while some clergy are involved in violence-interruption programs, very few actively promote gun-reform laws.

“It’s a complicated issue for them,” she said. “It has become increasingly political.” And politics is often considered taboo in houses of worship, which can lose their tax-exempt status if they engage in campaigning — not to mention lose members who may disagree.

No one knows this better than the Rev. Rob Schenck. Schenck spent 20 years as a very public activist for Operation Rescue, the conservative Christian anti-abortion-rights group known for their graphic protests at women’s health clinics. He was also the president and founder of Faith and Action (now Faith & Liberty), a Washington, D.C., organization, which according to Schenck had 55,000 donors and a $2 million annual budget; the group’s aim was to increase Christianity’s influence on the U.S. government.

But in the 2010s, Schenck had a change of heart on abortion, same-sex marriage and guns — three issues central to evangelical identity. In 2018, he resigned from Faith and Action over differences about his anti-gun mission. He then founded The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to the German cleric’s theology and ethics, which Schenck says has 4,000 donors and a $400,000 annual budget.

Schenck is not daunted by the change. Instead, he uses his experience inside the evangelical world to talk to conservative pastors and congregations about their affinity for guns. Drawing on his time in Operation Rescue, he frames his argument as an extension of the pro-life movement.

“I’m not the first one to have this thought, but the right to life does not end when the baby is born,” he said from his office in Washington, D.C. “That’s the way to find common ground with Catholics, with Jews, with Muslims, with conservatives, with liberals, with conservative Christians, progressive Christians, mainline Christians.”

But it’s still a hard sell. Schenck was the main subject of the 2015 documentary “The Armor of Light,” which shows him trying to convince a room full of white evangelical clergy to join his side of the gun issue. They stare back at him as if he had asked them to fly to the moon and back.

“When I look into the eyes of those folks, I think they really genuinely believe that God wants them to own a gun,” he said.

Still, Schenck has hope. 

Young evangelicals like Claiborne are more open to questioning and reframing the church’s relationship with guns than their parents or grandparents were. “They’re more skeptical about the Second Amendment and the pro-gun culture and more serious about what Jesus literally said,” said Schenck. “They think this question is worth looking at.”

‘The business of the church’

According to IBISWorld, an industry analyst, Americans spend $15 billion in gun stores annually. That includes everything from firearms and ammunition to cases, safes, apparel and accessories.

Many of these products link religion — most often Christianity — to the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Go to Amazon, Etsy, Walmart or any major retail chain and you will see clothes, flags, charm bracelets, wall plaques, license plate holders and just about everything else available with symbols and slogans declaring fidelity to God and guns. One company called Tactical Baby Gear sells a patch emblazoned with “God, Guns & Diapers” under the outline of an AR-15-style assault rifle.

Schenck likes to bring out a black-bound, leather Bible cover that opens up to reveal not the usual tissue-thin pages but a 9mm Glock — a gun literally wrapped in the word of God.

“In our defense of the Second Amendment,” Schenck asks in a video as he holds the Bible-as-gun-case, “are we in fact violating the Second Commandment?” In Protestant faiths, that commandment is “Thou shalt not make any graven image.”

And dozens of companies, from small mom-and-pop outfits to national organizations, offer security and firearms training specially tailored for pastors, ushers and greeters, and for teams of armed “guardians” or “gate keepers.” Agape Tactical offers a “Warrior Women” class for armed women in the pews and quotes the biblical book of Proverbs on its website: “A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.” One pastor told The Circuit Magazine, “Church security is becoming the business of the church.”

Barry Young is the vice president of church security for Strategos International, a security-training company based in Missouri and Texas. In 2015 — the year of the Mother Emanuel shooting — he said Strategos did church training sessions in 30 houses of worship. Now they do 300 annually, a number that spiked dramatically after the Sutherland Springs massacre.

Strategos, which is Christian in its mission and has since conducted training at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, approaches its work like a ministry. Instructors and trainees pray and sometimes worship together.

“We believe humility breeds capability,” he said in a phone interview from Kansas City, Missouri, where he is based. “I think you can tell how powerful somebody is by how gentle they are.”

In its two-day church training workshops, Strategos teaches that the use of guns is a sort of last resort, Young said. First, they focus on awareness and prevention — strategically placing greeters in the parking lot, training ushers to spot erratic behavior, reconfiguring the church’s locks and other existing safety measures and — most importantly, Young said — verbal de-escalation methods.

“We choose who we certify to carry, not the church,” Young said. “They must have a mindset for safety. If they don’t exhibit the right frame of mind” — for example, if they are too eager to shoot or too nervous to shoot — “then we won’t certify them.”

Young said Strategos declines to certify 2 to 5 percent of trainees because they do not pass this kind of “spiritual gut check.” And the majority — 85 percent — of its church workshops do not include guns, Young said.

“We will do it [gun training] if they ask,” Young said. “But I would rather a church have an unarmed security team that is trained than an armed security team that is untrained.”

Guns in the pulpit and the pews

Like everyone else in this story, Frank Pomeroy of the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs looks at the relationship between guns and religion through the prism of his own experience. And that extends to losing members of his own congregation, including his daughter, to a disturbed man with a semi-automatic rifle.

In the media frenzy that descended on his white-walled church after the violence, Pomeroy feels he and other licensed, gun-carrying Christians have been unfairly portrayed as “ignorant hillbillies.” The decision to carry a gun in the pulpit, put about 20 of the church’s 187 members through security training and ensure 10 of them are armed every Sunday morning was made after prayer and reflection, he said.

He thinks it is a mistake to spiritualize a gun — an inanimate object — and likens his Kimber Micro 9 handgun to the automated external defibrillator that hangs on the church wall. The spiritual question isn’t whether it should be there, but how it should be used.

“The only spiritual aspect of this is the human condition,” Pomeroy said. “A person who wrongfully uses firearms to take a life has deeper issues than the firearm. They have sin problems and issues that need to be addressed on a spiritual level. The firearm itself is not the problem, it's the people holding those firearms.”

Today, First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs meets in a brand-new building. The old church was clapboard, and the shooter shot through its walls. The new building, which opened its doors in May 2019, is fortified limestone with sanctuary doors that can be locked at the press of a button.

Pomeroy hopes he never has to use his gun inside his church (he was away in Oklahoma City on the day of the shooting). Today he speaks publicly in other churches and on panels about church security. Sometimes people on the panel oppose him, which he welcomes as a means to de-escalate the political polarization in America.

When told about the Rev. Sharon Risher and how she came to a completely different understanding of guns through the lens of their shared Christianity, he said he would be open to talking to her about their shared experience as grieving survivors.

“If we don’t have an open mind and come to the table to have a conversation about it, then there’s no way to ever win,” he said. “And it isn’t about winning. It’s about doing what is best for people.”

“And I would pray for her,” Pomeroy adds. “Not to change her mind so much as that hopefully myself or someone like me is there to protect her when we’re needed because she wouldn't be able to protect herself.”

Art direction by Emily Scherer. Chart by Simran Parwani. Copy editing by Jennifer Mason and Curtis Yee. Photo research by Jeremy Elvas. Story editing by Sarah Frostenson.

This story is part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.

CORRECTION (Nov. 5, 2021, 11:45 a.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, 88 percent of gun owners said owning a gun was essential to their sense of religious freedom. This should have said that 74 percent of all gun owners agreed with the statement that owning a gun was essential to their own sense of freedom. The text has been updated.

In our new video series, “Reigning Supreme,” senior legal reporter Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux explores the court’s power — and reveals the hidden ways the justices affect American life — through the issues on the docket this year. In this first episode, she digs into the history of the Second Amendment and the way politics influence the Supreme Court’s decisions.

This video is part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.

In recent years, the FBI — which manages the system that vets gun buyers — processed an average of 8.6 million gun background checks annually, according to historical data analyzed by FiveThirtyEight.¹⁶ But last year, the bureau processed 12,761,328 background checks, according to FBI data obtained by FiveThirtyEight through a public records request.

Perhaps most alarming, the FBI never finished over 316,000 background checks in the first nine months of 2020 alone — far more than in any other year on record. And that number doesn’t include October, November and December — usually the busiest months for gun sales, when 3.4 million background checks were opened last year.

In other words, it’s impossible to know how many guns were sold to people in 2020 who couldn’t legally own them because those background checks were never completed.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/support-gun-control-led-legislation-77033996

Asked why it didn’t finish so many background checks in 2020, the FBI said in a statement that it “depends on the availability of relevant information and records provided by federal, state, local, and tribal agencies.” The bureau also said that it has “reallocated resources to help ensure that it can continue processing background checks efficiently.”

Gun sales have surged since April 2020, thanks, at least in part, to the pandemic, protests last summer for racial justice and the election of President Biden in November. The FBI data shows how the background check system has struggled to keep up. And, at this point, it’s unclear when the problem is going to get better.

A growing problem

The share of background checks the FBI never completes has ticked up slowly since 2014, the first year on record, when it processed 8,256,688 checks and didn’t complete 172,879, or just under 2.1 percent. 

But by 2019, the bureau was failing to complete about 2.5 percent of the background checks it processed, and it didn’t finish almost 3.4 percent in the first nine months of 2020.

Those numbers only include gun background checks run by the FBI, so they don’t count the 20 states that process some or all background checks themselves. It’s also important to remember that the number of background checks isn’t the same as the number of guns sold — many are also run when people apply for gun permits, for example, or when states check on the status of gun permit holders. A single background check can also represent multiple gun sales.

Still, the background check numbers for 2020 are staggering. 

The consulting firm Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting uses the total number of federal and state background checks to estimate how many represent actual gun sales, rather than concealed-carry permits or other processes that go through the background check system.

There were a total of more than 39.3 million federal and state background checks in 2020, according to the FBI. From that, the firm estimates that almost 23 million guns were sold last year, compared to just 13.9 million in 2019.

The firm’s chief economist, Jurgen Brauer, said he hasn’t seen anything like it in his 15 years working with the background check data.

“Nobody has,” Brauer said. “Everyone you talk with in the industry is perplexed.”

In fact, before the pandemic, gun sales were so low observers called it the “Trump slump.” But they then spiked dramatically in March 2020, and have remained high over the last year, overwhelming the background check system.

From bad to worse

Three numbers highlight the size of the problem we’re dealing with: (1) how many background checks take longer than three business days; (2) how many checks the FBI never completes; and (3) how many people who can’t legally own a gun are able to buy one anyway because of those delays.

The FBI responds to most gun background checks with an immediate “yes” or “no.” But sometimes, it has to delay the check to do more research because its records are incomplete. After three business days, the dealer can sell the gun anyway. Many, including large chains like Walmart, choose not to. But ones that do don’t have to tell the FBI about it.

In an average year, almost 275,000 background checks take longer than three business days. In 2020, there were 535,786 such checks, according to FBI data. That number doesn’t include background checks for things like concealed-carry permits or explosives licenses, which aren’t subject to the three-business-day rule.

Meanwhile, the FBI keeps researching. But after 90 days, the bureau’s regulations require it to stop work and delete the background check from its computers. To make sure it doesn’t violate that policy, the bureau actually deletes unfinished background checks on day 88 just to be safe.

In the first nine months of 2020, the FBI deleted 316,912 unfinished background checks — 3.4 percent of all the checks it processed. In an average year, it deletes about 202,000. Again, this only includes background checks that are subject to the three-business-day rule.

If the FBI discovers that the potential buyer can’t own a gun in between day three and day 88, it contacts the dealer to see if the sale went through anyway. If it did, the FBI asks the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (the ATF) to retrieve the weapon.

Between 2014 and 2019, there were on average at least 3,800 of these so-called “delayed denial” sales annually, according to ATF data obtained by the gun-control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. But there were at least 5,807 in all of 2020, according to the ATF data — the most since 2006, the first complete year on record.

There’s no evidence that delayed denial sales are a major driver of crime, and some point to the relatively small number that ATF records each year as proof that the law doesn’t need to change.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/US/video/remembering-george-floyd-year-protest-77890592

But the ATF data is just the part of the iceberg that’s above the water. The FBI does not finish most gun background checks that take longer than three business days. Because it deletes those unfinished background checks, it’s impossible to know how many would have been denied — and how many of those people were able to buy a gun anyway.

And even if the numbers are relatively small, they can have tragic consequences. In April 2015, Dylann Roof bought a .45-caliber Glock handgun a few days after the FBI delayed his background check because of incomplete records about his prior drug arrest. Two months later, Roof used the gun to kill nine people during a Bible study at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

The three-business-day deadline is written into federal law. But deleting unfinished background checks after 88 days is a matter of FBI regulations and policy, according to Rob Wilcox, federal legal director for Everytown.

“There’s no law that requires the FBI to delete delayed background checks,” Wilcox said. “The regulation sets the deletion date at 90 days, and that regulation could be changed through the administrative process.”

Few answers and fewer solutions

The question of why so many background checks go unfinished, and why the numbers haven’t improved over time, doesn’t have a clear answer.

The FBI poured millions into upgrading and automating parts of the gun background check system from 2012 to 2016, and Congress passed new legislation aimed at fixing the system in 2018. But every year, the delays keep piling up.

The 2015 FBI report on Roof’s background check found that slow responses and incomplete records were the biggest cause of delays. It also singled out FBI policies that limited how inspectors from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) could do research on a background check and how the system prioritized keeping the immediate response rate at 90 percent rather than clearing the relatively small number of open cases.

The report also found that NICS had trouble handling the normal volume of background checks without resorting to an “escalation plan” that involved surging all available staff to handle background check requests.

FiveThirtyEight asked the FBI whether it has enough staff to process the current volume of background checks. In response, the bureau pointed to two-year supplemental funding it received in the fiscal year 2021 budget that it said will help pay for additional staff, IT resources and other productivity enhancements. 

“The ongoing system improvements being performed with the supplemental funding enhance the efficiency of processing gun background checks,” the bureau said in a statement.

The National Shooting Sports Foundation, which represents the firearms industry, has worked to get more state and local records — especially ones related to mental health — into the background check system in order to cut down on delays. It’s also working with appropriations committees on the Hill to get more resources for NICS and the ATF, according to Lawrence Keane, the organization’s senior vice president for government and public affairs.

“They have told us they need more resources,” Keane said. “They need more bodies as well as technology, to meet the growing demands.”

“The industry wants NICS to function properly,” he added.

But others, like Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, think Congress needs to change the law so dealers can’t sell a gun without a completed background check. 

The Democratic congressman has sponsored a bill, S. 591, that would require a completed background check for a gun sale. The bill, which the National Shooting Sports Foundation opposes, is currently pending in the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Another bill, H.R. 1446, which passed the House earlier this year, would replace the three-business-day window with a 10-day window after which the potential buyer would have to certify that they’re not prohibited from owning a gun. It’s also pending in the Senate.

But as long as the filibuster stands, the hope for any new gun legislation is thin. A similar bill that passed the House during the last Congress died in the Senate. And a third bill that would have kept the FBI from deleting unfinished background checks died in the House.

Ultimately, it’s not clear what the solution is. Gun-control advocates would like to see the law changed so dealers can’t sell guns until a background check is complete. Opponents say that even with all the time in the world, the FBI can’t complete background checks if it doesn’t get the right records from state and local officials.

What is clear is that even if the current surge in gun sales wanes, as some in the industry predict, the long-term trajectory is pointing up. The question is how to build a system that can handle an ever-growing number of guns.

“One uncompleted check is a problem,” Blumenthal said in a statement, “but 316,000 uncompleted checks is a systemic failure of an already overburdened system.”

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/politics-podcast-summer-mailbag-edition-fivethirtyeight-78499147

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/republicans-starting-make-climate-agenda-fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-78546775

Over the weekend protests against anti-Asian violence took place across the country in response to the killing of eight people — six of whom were women of Asian descent — in three spas around Atlanta. The protests also addressed the broader context of anti-Asian rhetoric and violence, which has increased since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew speaks with professors Jane Junn and Karthick Ramakrishnan about the attacks and how political participation among Asian Americans has evolved in recent decades.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

But other people are counting. On Monday, the advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety released its own non-fatal shooting estimates. Pulling from existing data that shows 73,330 Americans are shot and injured every year, Everytown applied its own analysis to turn that big number into more detailed demographic lessons — like the fact that rural and urban counties have about the same rate of gun injuries per 100,000 people. Overall, the estimated number of people shot and not killed in this country is twice as many are estimated to be killed by guns each year in the U.S.

But Everytown for Gun Safety is an advocacy organization — one that is explicitly in favor of gun control laws. Can it effectively pick up the federal government’s slack in the field of gun violence research?

To understand the void Everytown is trying to fill, we need to revisit what created the void. These conversations inevitably drift towards the Dickey Amendment, a rider to a 1996 spending bill that banned the use of federal money to “advocate or promote gun control.” The language was vague. The effects were far-reaching — politicians, gun control advocates and scientists have all said the amendment had a chilling effect on gun-related research at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. Even when Congress officially clarified that the Dickey Amendment didn’t mean the CDC couldn’t study gun violence, they didn’t provide funding to make that research happen. In 2012, for example, the CDC had $100,000 to spend on gun violence. That can’t even buy you a house in D.C.

But the Dickey Amendment didn’t cut off funding of gun violence research everywhere. Several other federal agencies fund this science, said James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Minnesota’s Metropolitan State University. His research includes developing a database of mass shootings funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research and development agency serving the Department of Justice.

Federal funding definitely makes a difference, Densley told me. On his own, he doesn’t have the authority to ask for certain types of information and resources. But with the “full faith and credit” of his federal grant number, he can convince law enforcement and other official agencies to let him have access to crucial data. Private foundations also fund gun violence research, though Densley said those grants are often one-time payouts made by an organization before it moves on to other do-gooding.

In fact, the numbers Everytown released Monday came from (or, rather, were produced through analysis of) data collected by the Department of Health and Human Services. This database is basically a collection of hospital emergency room intake and discharge forms sampled from 20 percent of the hospitals in the country. It’s not specifically aimed at studying gun violence, but it can be used that way. And it typifies the kind of large-scale, multi-state data collection that basically requires the federal government’s involvement to get done.

Instead of attempting to do better data collection on its own, with fewer resources and less social capital, groups like Everytown often find themselves adding analytical value to federal data. The HHS database, for instance, has a public portal (we’ve used it), but it’s not great for producing the kind of detailed demographics Everytown thought were missing from public knowledge. So while the overall number of gun injuries comes directly from HHS, Everytown (like other researchers) had to buy the data and do the analysis themselves to pull out things like income and ages of people getting shot, said Sarah Burd-Sharps, Everytown’s research director. Everyone would be better off, she told me, if the CDC just had the funding to improve their injury survey and make detailed gun violence data reliable and accessible to begin with.

What’s more, other experts said, we’d be better off if the analysis wasn’t coming from Everytown. Statistics released by the CDC are considered the gold standard, said Deb Azrael, who works at the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center, because of that whole “full faith and credit” thing. “Not that federal data would be perfect,” Azrael said. “But when I see data from Everytown or The Trace,¹⁷ I don’t know what they’re missing. Maybe nothing. But if I put it in a paper, I can guarantee that a reviewer would push back and say, ‘How do you know this is any good?’” And that’s even before you get to the political pushback. If you’re worried about bias in favor of gun control at the CDC, you’re really gonna hate the priors at Everytown.

So no, nonprofits can’t replace the federal government on gun violence research. But, surprisingly, experts also told me that the Dickey Amendment is a bad bogeyman to fear. Remember, it didn’t end all federal funding of gun research. Nor, said Azrael and Densley, is that particular amendment the main thing holding back funding.

It’s definitely true that some in Washington are worried about what will happen if the government funds gun violence research, Azrael told me. And she thinks that’s a huge problem. She and Densley both think federal funding is as necessary to their field of research as it is to the scientists trying to cure cancer. “But the specter of, ‘Oh, if only we could get rid of Dickey the world would change drastically.’ That’s overplayed,” she said.

But it’s nice to know I’m not alone. Nearly 47 million American adults — about 19 percent of us — deal with a mental illness of some sort. Serious mental illness, the kind that can keep people from being able to do normal life activities, is also pretty common: It affects 11 million American adults. Even with a specific, uncommon diagnosis like schizophrenia, you’re still talking about (at the low end of the estimates) some half a million Americans.

Almost none of us are mass shooters.

After the recent mass shootings this summer, President Trump said mental illness is a cause of violence and could be a predictive tool for spotting dangerous people. But that won’t work — there are just too many people who “fit the description” and too much confusion about what “the description” even means.

Take, for instance, the links between suicide and mass violence. Last week, I wrote a story about researchers’ findings that many mass shooters are also suicidal. None of this research compared perpetrators of mass violence to the general population, which is just the first of many reasons that the presence or absence of suicidal thoughts is not a great way to predict who will become dangerous. After the article was published, several readers asked me whether those findings meant that President Trump was right to blame mass shootings on mental illness and see institutionalization as a solution.

Short answer: Nope. He wasn’t.

First, you’ve got a problem with the statistics. There is evidence that people with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, do commit acts of violence at a greater rate than people who don’t suffer from those disorders. But that comes with some really big asterisks.

A couple studies have shown that most or all of that difference can be accounted for by whether or not the people in question have a substance abuse problem on top of everything else. And, more importantly, the difference is still so modest that it’s kind of useless as a predictor of violence. So, for instance, a 2011 study involving a survey of more than 34,000 people found that 10 percent of people with both a serious mental illness and a substance abuse disorder committed an act of violence in a given year — compared to about 0.8 percent of people with neither issue. But that still leaves a lot of nonviolent, mentally ill addicts in the world — enough that using those two factors alone as your predictor of violence would make you wrong nine times out of 10.

And that counts all types of violence — these totals don’t distinguish between, say, bar fights, throwing something at a roommate and threatening someone with a knife. Your likelihood of being wrong about someone’s propensity for violence goes up even more when you’re talking about specific, very rare types of violence like mass shootings.

Which brings us to our second problem: The definitional one. What does mental illness mean to you? Existing gun background checks and the president’s statements imply that the risks come from people with serious disorders, the kind of thing that we used to put people in institutions for. But that’s not what’s turning up as a characteristic among mass shooters. Instead, mass shooters often have the kind of mental health problems that are much more common and prosaic — plain old depression, personal crises, poor coping skills, and thoughts of or attempts at suicide.

Potential mass shooters aren’t easy to spot, but the contradictions in our logic about them are:

• The kinds of severe mental illnesses we’re so often afraid of don’t seem to be strongly associated with mass violence.
• The serious mental illnesses that are loosely linked with violence are still a poor predictor of who will become violent.
• The mental illnesses that seem to be common among people who commit mass violence aren’t good predictors of violence.
• And we have no idea how people who commit mass violence differ from the general population — we only know what they have in common with each other.

You can see the problem. This is why experts say we shouldn’t be talking about mental illness as a cause of mass violence.

Americans would certainly benefit from being able to more easily and cheaply see a therapist or get mental health treatment when they need it. And the researchers I spoke with for my recent article do think access to that kind of care would reduce mass violence by helping some of the tiny fraction of people who might otherwise turn a suicidal tendency into a homical one.

But that’s not the same thing as saying that a diagnosis will help you find the Americans who are bad and scary and dangerous. And it’s certainly not the same thing as saying that you can prevent mass violence by taking those people and locking them away in an institution.

Just ask me. And nearly 47 million other Americans.

Just because cancer and broken legs are both things that happen to the body doesn’t mean they call for the same treatment. These are the kinds of issues policymakers face every day. Take gun violence. It feels like one big problem, but it’s actually a bunch of different problems that don’t necessarily have a single cause. So when somebody wants to, say, prevent mass shootings with a policy that originated as a suicide-prevention tool, it’s reasonable to have some questions about whether that makes any sense.

And that’s exactly what’s happening with “red flag laws,” the gun legislation model of the moment, which even many gun-control-averse Republicans have supported in the wake of mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. Studies have shown that state-level versions of these laws have been effective at preventing suicide. But can they actually address the separate issue of mass shootings? Surprisingly, experts think they could. And that’s because — just like a fragile, cracked bone could be a symptom of certain kinds of cancers — researchers are finding evidence that suicides and mass shootings can often be different expressions of the same problem.

“Many of these mass shootings are angry suicides,” says James Densley, professor of criminal justice at Minnesota’s Metropolitan State University.

Densley is part of a team that is working on a database of more than 150 mass shootings that took place between 1966 and 2018. His data won’t be public until January, but he said about half the attackers in his sample had demonstrated signs of feeling suicidal before they hurt others. A different set of researchers who analyzed 41 school shooters for the Secret Service and Department of Education found that 78 percent had a history of thinking about or attempting suicide.

“We’ve even talked to a couple of people who tried to kill themselves but failed and then launched an attack because they were hoping police would kill them,” said Marisa Randazzo, a former chief psychologist for the Secret Service who now consults on active threat assessment with schools and other organizations.

A third set of researchers, who compiled the details of 119 lone-actor terrorists, did not specifically track whether the people in their data set had thought about or attempted suicide, but the researchers told me they also found significant overlap between homicidal violence and choices that suggested suicidal tendencies. “A fairly sizeable subset only planned this to be a one-off event” — that is, something they didn’t return from — said Paul Gill, a professor of security and crime science at University College London and the researcher in charge of that data set. “They were taking preparations to maximize the chances of death by cop or their own hand.”

All of this means that the people who commit violent mass killings overlap, at least somewhat, with people who are feeling suicidal.

Red flag laws — which are intended to take guns out of the hands of people who might be a danger to themselves or others — aren’t going to eliminate either suicide or mass shootings, experts said. At best, these are crude tools. Plenty of people who own a gun and feel suicidal do not go on to harm themselves or attack others, and not all mass shooters were known to feel suicidal before the attack, which means the net cast by these policies will scoop up a lot of people who would never have hurt anyone while also missing some people who do go on to commit acts of violence. But enough of a pattern of suicidal feelings shows up in mass shooters that the laws might be able to reduce the rates of both.

There’s no single type of red flag law. The phrase is more of an umbrella term for a range of regulations implemented in at least 17 states. Typically, they allow people to report the dangerous behavior or mental state of someone they know. From there, those reports are evaluated and, if necessary, authorities can temporarily confiscate the troubled individual’s guns and prevent them from buying more. Once the crisis has passed, the person can get their guns back.

These rules were originally about suicide prevention, Densley told me, and were built as extensions of voluntary campaigns that encourage gun owners to give their guns to a friend if they are feeling suicidal. Experts in suicide prevention have long supported campaigns like this because of the strong links between gun accessibility and suicide. Most gun deaths in this country are suicides, and guns are the leading means of suicide. Experts say that when someone is suicidal, if they decide to act on that feeling, they are likely to turn to a familiar tool they’re already comfortable using — and when that tool is a gun, it’s particularly likely to be lethal.

And at least when it comes to suicide prevention, there’s evidence that red flag laws do work. In the decade after passing a red flag law, Indiana saw a 7.5 percent reduction in firearm suicides. In Connecticut, a red flag law was associated with a 13.7 percent reduction in firearm suicides between 2007 and 2015.

Polls show that Americans broadly support this kind of intervention, with 77 percent supporting red flag laws that allow family members to seek a court order to temporarily take away a person’s guns. And that’s true even among gun owners, where support for this kind of law polled at 67 percent. But, ultimately, red flag laws are about the state taking private property, and that can get dicey. Last year, in Maryland, police serving a red flag law order ended up fatally shooting the man they ostensibly came to save from himself. Even when things don’t turn violent, there are still civil liberties to consider. There’s no way to tell how many of the people who have their guns confiscated would actually have harmed themselves or others if they were left alone.

In the last decade, though, policy makers have begun to use red flag laws to try to prevent mass shootings as well. That makes sense in some ways, given what we know about the overlaps between suicidality and mass violence. But it also requires changing the way we think about mass shooters and how to prevent them.

Law enforcement has long tried to profile the people most likely to commit these crimes — and we aren’t very good at it, experts told me. Even once you identify some details that many of the attackers have in common, such a large swath of the population shares these traits that the “profile” is fairly useless for prevention. Red flag laws circumvent that problem by focusing less on a type of person and more on a type of emotional and situational crisis — where the people involved aren’t necessarily “bad guys” but troubled individuals in need of help. Gill thinks of it as a public health approach, analogous to the way we treat physical health problems that are hard to profile.

“We know that raised cholesterol leads to heart problems. We don’t have the ability to predict who in the general population who already has raised cholesterol will go on to have a heart attack. So we put in place prevention policies to try to decrease cholesterol in the whole ‘at risk’ community,” he said.

For the researchers who study mass violence, what’s appealing about red flag laws is that these rules have the potential to shift the emphasis from a cut-and-dried checklist of dangerous traits to a more nuanced system that accounts for a person’s big-picture emotional state. And that matters, because, it turns out, family and friends of a mass shooter are often aware that something is wrong long before the violence happens. That happened one-third of the time in Densley’s database, 64 percent in Gill’s, and 81 percent in the cases Randazzo logged.

Densley cautioned that these shootings are still extremely rare events, so the research is more about finding previously overlooked patterns than proving that a single set of traits led people to become mass shooters. What’s more, none of these research teams collected data on people who didn’t commit shootings, so they can’t say with confidence whether any of these traits are more common in mass shooters than they are in the general population. (Although Gill told me that a study that does do this is in the works.)

But right now, experts said, even when friends, family and teachers know something is wrong with a potential shooter, they may not be able to actually do much about it. Sometimes people don’t know who to tell. Sometimes they choose not to tell in order to avoid sending a loved one to prison for crimes they haven’t yet committed. Sometimes the authorities can’t do anything because the nature of the threat doesn’t include illegal behavior.

“We interviewed a social worker who had an encounter with a school shooter who had been in a suicidal crisis and [had] been admitted to the hospital before his eventual shooting occurred,” Densley said. “The social worker immediately recognized something was wrong and tried very hard to get the individual into treatment, but there were a lot of questions about his exact diagnosis and availability of psychiatric care in the community. In the end, she was unable to secure him the treatment she was trying very, very hard to get. And a few weeks later he went on to perpetrate a school shooting.”

All these researchers supported red flag laws because they could create a clear plan of action for friends and family concerned about a loved one’s combination of emotional crisis and violent threats. It creates a place to take concerns, a system to evaluate those concerns and a means of mitigating them. That’s particularly true, researchers said, if national red flag laws are set up so that the system isn’t punitive. Ideally, the process would focus on helping a person get through to the other side of an emotional crisis rather than putting them in jail. It’s also important, the researchers said, to make sure the laws are focused on professional evaluations of overall behavior, not checklists.

But if those parts work together the way they should, then red flag laws really could be a useful tool for combating the segment of mass shootings that function like very public, violent suicides. “There’s an important piece when we interviewed school shooters and active threat cases,” Randazzo said. “They feel very strongly about two things: They have to carry out the violence, they have no options left, but they also don’t want to do it and hope someone will stop them.”

Now the CDC is taking measures to curtail the spread of its most unreliable estimates. The 2016 and 2017 gun injury figures have been hidden on the agency’s public data portal, with a footnote stating “Injury estimate is not shown because it is unstable.” The CDC will hide unstable estimates for all injury types within the next six months, according to a spokesperson. Also, the option to include statistical information about how reliable or unreliable the estimates are is now enabled by default. Until recently, it was disabled by default.

The changes follow reporting by FiveThirtyEight and The Trace, a nonprofit news organization covering gun violence in America,¹⁸ that highlighted the unreliable estimates.

The CDC’s gun injury estimate was vulnerable to unreliability in part because of how few hospitals are surveyed in the data set that feeds it. When one hospital is replaced by another in the database the CDC uses, the changeover can cause the injury estimate to swing drastically. The CDC now says it is exploring the feasibility of collecting data from more hospitals, which would improve the estimate’s reliability.

An analysis by The Trace and FiveThirtyEight shows just how sensitive the current model is to changes in the sample. There’s no national database dedicated to tracking shooting incidents, so the CDC uses a more general injury database managed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The number of gun injuries treated in each hospital in the database is fed into a statistical model that extrapolates a national estimate. The smaller the number of hospitals in the pool, the larger the effect each one has on the estimate. Over time, hospitals leave the sample for a variety of reasons and are replaced.

The trouble is, the departing hospital and its replacement may treat very different numbers of injuries. From at least 2000 to 2010, a hospital labeled Primary Sampling Unit 41 submitted data to the CPSC’s panel. Raw numbers published by the CDC and CPSC show that this hospital treated a very small number of gunshot injuries: fewer than 10 each year from 2005 to 2010, and just 20 total over that six-year span. When this hospital dropped out of the database in 2010, it was replaced halfway through 2012 with a different one that treated a dramatically larger number of gun wounds: 793 during its first full year in the dataset.¹⁹

Using methods developed in a 2017 paper that demonstrated the effect of hospital replacements in a larger but similar database, we analyzed data from the CDC and CPSC to measure the impact of this one substitution. The new hospital added over 22,000 nonfatal gun injuries to the 2015 national estimate — more than 100 times greater than the most ever contributed by its predecessor.²⁰ This hospital — one of the 60 or so used in the sample — accounts for over one quarter of the total estimated gunshot injuries that year, which is the most recent data available.

When making a substitution in the database, the CPSC attempts to match the replacement hospital to the original based on some characteristics, such as its geographic location and size. But according to Guohua Li, editor-in-chief of the medical journal Injury Epidemiology and founding director of Columbia University’s Center for Injury Science and Prevention, the CDC’s methodology doesn’t take into account factors like the volume of gun injuries treated, which leaves the estimate vulnerable to dramatic jumps like this one. He says the quickest way to address the problem would be to adjust the methodology to account for the larger volume of gun injuries.

The CDC acknowledges that hospitals that have recently been added to the system have been adding more gunshot injuries to the national estimate than the hospitals they replaced. “The influence of a gradually changing roster of participating hospitals does not translate to poor data quality,” the spokesperson from the CDC said in an email, “but rather reflects the varying characteristics of these hospitals.”

Other gun injury estimates are less susceptible to the distortions that hospital selection can introduce. The Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, another database under the Department of Health and Human Services, uses data from more than 950 hospitals to create its own gun injury estimate — far more than the CDC. Among multiple sources of national gun injury data that The Trace and FiveThirtyEight reviewed last year, the CDC’s was the only data set that consistently showed an increase in gunshots from year to year — an indicator that its estimates are out of step with other reliable data sources.

In May, the CDC’s leader acknowledged that the numbers needed to be fixed. Responding to an inquiry by 11 senators, CDC Director Robert Redfield wrote in a letter that the agency intends to “improve the precision and accuracy of [its] non-fatal firearm injury estimates.”

One solution would be to add more hospitals to the sample. “By expanding the roster of participating hospitals,” Redfield wrote, “the influence of any one hospital should be reduced and more stable estimates should be attainable.”

The CDC and CPSC are currently in the process of evaluating the system that is generating the national injury estimate, along with whether it needs to be expanded and how much it would cost to do so.

Sen. Bob Menendez, the New Jersey lawmaker who led the group that wrote the original letter this spring, is continuing to keep pressure on the agency. A new letter signed by him and four other Democratic senators says that “the CDC’s explanation falls short” and pushes Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar for clarifications about several of the points in Redfield’s response.

Li is happy the CDC is willing to make a change. “But I wish they had acknowledged the problems identified in a more straightforward way.”

We will likely never know how much the El Paso shooter was influenced by rhetoric like Trump’s. But we do know that since Trump took office, surveys and studies have shown that Latinos, particularly Latino immigrants, have become more insecure and fearful about their place in the country.

And the El Paso shooting, which officials are treating as an act of terrorism, seems likely to reinforce and deepen these anxieties. The direct effect of a politician’s words is impossible to measure, but there’s evidence that in addition to creating a general sense of distress, Trump’s words may be fueling prejudice and aggressive behavior against Latinos and other minority groups.

Latinos feel more insecure than before 2016

In the wake of the El Paso shootings, many Latinos have said they are afraid for their safety. But George Escobar, the chief of programs and services at CASA de Maryland, an immigrant rights advocacy group, told me that this fear is just an escalation of concerns that are already common among the communities he works with. “Many people are afraid to go outside, to go to the grocery store — but we’ve been hearing similar fears for the past three years,” he said.

And overall, Latinos felt pessimistic and insecure about their place in the country well before the attack occurred. According to a Latino Decisions poll conducted in April, 51 percent of Latino registered voters think racism against Latinos and immigrants is a major problem (and 80 percent say it is at least somewhat of a problem). Meanwhile, as the chart below shows, a Pew Research Center survey conducted from July to September of 2018 found that nearly half of Hispanics say their situation has worsened over the past year, up from 32 percent soon after the 2016 election — a trend that began in the year or two before Trump was elected and has continued over his presidency.

According to that Pew survey, more than half of Latinos agree that it has become more difficult to be a Hispanic person living in the U.S. in recent years. And overall, a higher share of Latinos say the Trump administration’s policies have been harmful to Hispanics, compared with the policies of either the Barack Obama or George W. Bush administration.

Thomas Kennedy, the political director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said that Trump’s rhetoric helps reinforce general fears of harassment and concerns Latinos already have about issues like deportation. That same Pew survey found, for instance, that immigrant Latinos were particularly concerned about their place in America; two-thirds, regardless of their own immigration or citizenship status, say that they are worried about the possibility of deportation. “The hostility from Trump is a constant thing that’s happening in the background,” he said. “It makes the threat hard to forget, and it heightens a sense of vulnerability, your fear that your community is being targeted.”

Kennedy and other advocates said that Trump’s language has also emboldened more people to engage in smaller acts of harassment or discrimination, like telling people to speak English or go back to their own country. The Pew study, similarly, found that four in 10 Latinos say they’ve experienced some form of discrimination in the past 12 months. And other research indicates that Trump’s presidency may even be taking a toll on Latinos’ health.

Trump’s rhetoric could be fueling broader hostility toward minority groups

It’s hard to untangle the precise impact of Trump’s rhetoric on this anxiety and hostility. Social scientists who study the link between speech and violence told me that determining whether a politician’s words directly caused an attack like the one in El Paso is a bit of an intractable problem. Susan Benesch, the executive director of the Dangerous Speech Project, a research group working on the links between inflammatory rhetoric and intergroup violence, told me that it’s not really possible to draw a direct line between anything someone hears or reads and a particular action. “Often the person who carried out the act doesn’t know exactly why they did something,” she said.

But there is evidence that particular kinds of rhetoric like Trump’s may spur prejudice and aggressive behavior, particularly among people who were already predisposed to hostility or extremism. For example, Nathan Kalmoe, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University, found that exposure to mildly violent political metaphors increased support for political violence among people with aggressive personalities. And several other studies have also found that Trump’s rhetoric can increase prejudice against the groups he has targeted or make people more likely to express prejudice against those groups. These findings don’t indicate that this problem is widespread. (Other studies have actually found that white people, on average, say they’re less prejudiced now.) Instead, Trump may have encouraged people who were already prone to racism or aggression to say or do things they wouldn’t have before.

The way this works, several experts told me, is that inflammatory rhetoric can simultaneously dehumanize the groups it targets and paint them as a menacing force. Calling immigrants “invaders,” “thugs” or “animals” may encourage people who were already predisposed to aggressive or prejudiced behavior to see immigrants as a dangerous threat and make it easier to contemplate violence against them.

The nexus between Trump’s rhetoric and an act of violence is unusually clear in the case of the El Paso shooting, too. A screed allegedly written by the shooter echoed Trump’s frequent talk of an “invasion” of immigrants. And while the suspect did claim that he held these ideas before Trump entered the political scene, Kalmoe said that’s consistent with the way that political rhetoric can work in the world. Inflammatory language from the president might not persuade more people to adopt racist views, but it can make preexisting prejudices feel more urgent and pressing. “Racist rhetoric falsely alleging an invading subhuman horde signals an all-hands-on-deck emergency, demanding immediate action from people who already hate immigrants,” Kalmoe wrote in an email.

More research has suggested that Trump’s language may be at least partially fueling a broader rise in hate speech and hate crimes. One study found that hate crimes spiked dramatically after the 2016 election, to a level dwarfed only by the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, while another found that counties that hosted a Trump rally saw a significant increase in hate crimes. And other researchers found that Trump’s tweets about Islam-related topics were highly correlated with hate crimes against Muslims.

To be clear, the relationship between Trump’s rhetoric and hate crimes isn’t clear-cut, said Griffin Edwards, an economist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a co-author of one of the studies. But, he added, “it’s very plausible that Trump’s language validated and encouraged a new wave of aggressive and violent behavior.” And all of these findings can help explain why Latino and immigrant communities are feeling insecure — and how Trump’s rhetoric might have been contributing, even before the El Paso shooting.

As unshakable as this stalemate may seem, public opinion on gun control is not static. Support for regulating gun ownership can ebb and flow in response to mass shootings, probably in part because of how rapidly stories about any given mass shooting tend to rise and fall in the news cycle. For example, a Quinnipiac poll taken in February 2018 — just days after the mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida — found that 66 percent of Americans said they supported stricter gun laws and 31 percent said they were opposed. It was the highest support that Quinnipiac had ever measured. But by April, support was down to 56 percent and opposition was up to 39 percent. Other pollsters have also shown that, while the effect of mass shootings on public opinion does fade, support for stricter gun laws has never fallen all the way back to the level it was at before the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.

Indeed, the big-picture trend appears to be that, after bottoming out in the polls almost a decade ago, gun control has gotten more popular recently. Almost every year since 1990, Gallup has asked Americans about whether laws governing the sale of firearms in the U.S. should be made stricter, made less strict or kept as they are now. Because Gallup asks this question regularly, and usually not directly after a mass shooting has occurred — although this has not always been the case, and the polls conducted in the aftermath of mass shootings do tend to stand out — it gives us a less-noisy sense of how public opinion has shifted in the last 30 years. As you can see in the chart below, support for stricter gun laws has fallen from its historical high but is now trending back up.

In the early 1990s, huge majorities of Americans — even more than do so today — supported stricter gun laws; it was in this environment that both the 1993 “Brady bill” and the 1994 assault-weapons ban were enacted. But support for stricter gun laws then fell in the ensuing years (although there was a mini spike just before the assault-weapons ban expired in 2004) to the point where, at the beginning of this decade, roughly the same number of people favored stricter gun laws as were happy with the status quo.

However, since then — even ignoring the spikes apparently caused by the shootings in Parkland and at Sandy Hook — support for stricter gun laws has once again increased (although it’s still not as high as it was in the early 1990s). The latest Gallup poll, conducted in October 2018²¹ found that 61 percent of Americans supported stricter gun laws, compared with 30 percent who thought the laws should remain as they are.

Other pollsters also find a favorable signal for gun control amid all the noise. From the first to the most recent time Quinnipiac asked about stricter gun laws, support has increased from 52-45 in November 2015 to 61-34 in May 2019. And a series of Marist polls that were taken after mass shootings show that the heights of post-shooting spikes in support are only getting higher — from 60 percent support for stricter gun laws after Sandy Hook²² to 64 percent after Las Vegas to 71 percent after Parkland. So it seems that mass shootings in recent years have had a cumulative effect, pushing public opinion to the left on gun policy.

Perhaps even more importantly, a different Gallup question found that Americans have also begun rating gun policy as a more important issue over the last few years. In a December 2018 poll, Gallup found that 66 percent of Americans said it was “extremely” or “very” important that Congress and the White House deal with the issue of gun policy in the following year, which was a significant increase from the 54 percent of Americans who said gun policy was extremely or very important to them in January 2014. However, we still have a while before guns are the most important issue to Americans. In July 2019, only 1 percent said guns were the number-one problem facing the country — barely changed from the 0 percent who said so for most of the 2000s. And while this number does spike in response to mass shootings — it got as high as 7 percent in the six months after Sandy Hook and hit 13 percent after Parkland — so far, it has never stayed at those elevated levels for very long. So while public opinion has swung more toward the side of gun control in recent years, it may not yet be dramatic or consistent enough to force politicians to act.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Over the weekend at least 31 people were killed in mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. In the Texas shooting, the gunman’s attack appears to have been motivated by his white supremacist beliefs; the 21-year-old white man allegedly wrote that his attack was in response to the “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” echoing language that President Trump has used to talk about immigrants. (So far, there’s no indication of a similar motive in the Ohio shooting.)

On Monday, Trump addressed the attacks, saying “our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy.” But many people believe Trump helped fuel the Texas shooter, and this isn’t the first time his rhetoric has been criticized for sparking violence. Some 2020 presidential candidates, like Beto O’Rourke, squarely place the blame for what happened in El Paso at the feet of the president. At the same time, many Democrats have called for increased restrictions on gun ownership in the U.S. — an issue that seems unlikely to get passed by this Congress.

So how will what happened in El Paso affect the conversation around gun laws — and immigration — in 2020? And what does this mean for the growing problem of violent white extremism in the U.S.?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Well, we can probably expect a spike in support for stricter gun laws. Previous mass shootings, like Parkland, have certainly had that effect.

Although those spikes do tend to fade after a few weeks — probably because the shootings fade from the headlines. That said, overall support for gun regulations has increased this decade.

And we might even be starting to see the dam of gridlocked legislative action break as a result. After the Parkland shooting, for instance, Florida’s all-Republican government passed some moderate gun-control laws.

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): That’s right. There is a cumulative effect even if there’s also a short-term boom-and-bust cycle after significant events. During the midterm elections, for instance, more Democrats than Republicans rated gun policy as a high-priority issue, which is a departure from the old-school conventional wisdom that guns were supposed to rally Republican voters.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): It’ll be interesting, too, to see how much of the conversation going forward is about gun control and how much is about the issue of combating white nationalist extremism and terrorism.

The two are related insofar as white nationalist attacks like the one in El Paso are committed using guns, but the El Paso attack also highlighted just how common deadly white nationalist extremist attacks are becoming and how the government seems pretty ill-equipped to respond — separate from broader conversations on stricter gun laws.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): One thing I think might happen is that even some anti-gun-control Republicans will stop describing illegal immigration from Mexico as an “invasion,” which is language the alleged shooter reportedly used to describe the motivations for his attack.

But even though some Republicans — maybe even Trump, I’m not sure — will probably dial down the white nationalist rhetoric, I think the only movement on gun control will happen on the left. Or Democrats will become even more unabashedly party of gun control.

natesilver: Do any of the Democratic candidates have really aggressive policies on guns, e.g. a proposal to ban handguns? It seems like there actually isn’t that much daylight between the various Democrats on policy solutions, so it’s mostly a matter of how much they emphasize guns versus other issues. And how much they are willing to talk about race versus other issues.

perry: Cory Booker has a proposal to require a license to own a gun that I am not sure Joe Biden would endorse (since Biden is running as the person who can appeal to more conservative voters). But generally most Democrats support: 1) expanding background checks, 2) banning assault weapons, and 3) ban high-capacity magazines.

nrakich: And these proposals are overwhelmingly popular not just with Democrats, but the public as a whole, too.

ameliatd: And also fairly effective! At least according to this round-up of experts from 2017.

nrakich: But given how far left (and into unpopular general-election territory) Democrats have gone on some other issues, like decriminalizing border crossings, I guess it’s somewhat surprising that no one has gone further left on guns? But we still have several months to go.

perry: In reaction to the shooting in El Paso, I think the Democratic candidates are going to speak more openly about racism. O’Rourke in particular is really speaking bluntly about how Trump has fomented white nationalism in a way that I expect other candidates will mirror.

sarahf: So something we’re all touching on here is that this conversation isn’t just going to be about increased calls for stricter gun laws. It’s also going to be about how the president’s rhetoric may be driving some of the violence we’re seeing, especially as it pertains to intolerance regarding immigrants in the U.S.

Is that fair?

ameliatd: I think that’s fair, Sarah. After other mass shootings, it’s been easier for the public and politicians to seize on lots of different explanations (and make lots of different arguments about how to respond) because the shooter’s motive wasn’t clear. Here, the link to white supremacy was so obvious that Trump condemned it as such, although he didn’t do it in a way that addressed his own inflammatory rhetoric. But it does mean that the conversation may end up focusing on race and Trump’s rhetoric rather than gun control.

natesilver: And you already had several of the Democratic candidates happy to call the president a racist. In fact, it’s arguably a pretty core part of the strategy for Democrats who are running on liberal identity politics, for lack of a better term, or who are saying Trump is a historic evil or anomaly who must be stopped.

nrakich: Agreed, Amelia. And I think both those issues play well for Democrats politically in places like the suburbs, where they hope to build on 2018 gains in 2020.

Although swing voters may feel that some racial-justice issues, like reparations, go too far, I still think that many can get behind condemning racist and violence-inciting rhetoric.

Even some of Trump supporters say they wish he would tweet less!

ameliatd: Not to mention, a majority of Americans already think Trump encourages white supremacists.

perry: This gets into the whole debate about how Democrats won in 2018 and how they should run in 2020. Broadly speaking, there is a bloc of Democrats who thinks 2018 was won on health care and that the party should continue to focus on populist issues and avoid talking too much talk about Trump’s comments, which they think would focus the debate on the country’s growing racial diversity and drive away some white voters. And then there is the bloc who thinks we are already in a national debate about race and identity because of Trump and there is no way to sidestep that.

Both camps have valid arguments, and there are obviously ways to both run an anti-racist and populist campaign, but I also think this incident increases the salience of racial issues.

nrakich: Right, Perry, but I think there are safer ways to run on race (e.g., condemning white supremacy) and riskier ways (e.g., calling for reparations).

Nor is decrying racist rhetoric mutually exclusive with talking about issues like health care.

Voters are smart enough to vote on multiple things at once, and since health care is a policy question and rhetoric is a question of tone, I think they’re especially non-mutually-exclusive.

natesilver: It’s not the conversation that, say, Pete Buttigieg wants to be having, though. Or Bernie Sanders. Or Elizabeth Warren.

sarahf: And why is that? Is it because it risks politicizing the topic of gun violence in the U.S. even more?

natesilver: Maybe they’re in different categories. But I think Buttigieg has had trouble relating to voters of color, for all sorts of reasons. For Warren and Sanders, they’re running on a platform of economic change — or “economic justice,” if you prefer — which of course is correlated in lots of ways with racial justice, but that’s nonetheless a real point of debate in Democratic circles, and maybe one they’d rather avoid.

sarahf: So as Amelia mentioned earlier, what sets this shooting apart from some other (although not all) mass shootings is its link to white extremist ideology. And so I wonder what impact that will have on public opinion moving forward, including how Americans think about aspects of Trump’s rhetoric.

ameliatd: It’s really hard to draw a direct line between a politician’s rhetoric and a particular act of violence. But I’m working on a story looking at the research on this topic, and pretty much all of the social scientists I’ve spoken with agree that hostile political rhetoric, particularly from someone as influential as a president, can embolden people who already had prejudiced views or were prone to violence.

perry: This is really a conversation about Trump, right?

The general public is against white supremacist language and against mass shootings. So the core question is whether Trump will stop invoking the ideas expressed by the shooter in El Paso, and whether he can reframe his rhetoric and approach to make it clear he is against increased immigration, and not Latinos and nonwhite people in the U.S.

natesilver: Yeah, it’s a conversation about Trump. I feel like people are beating around the bush too much. It’s a conversation about Trump.

sarahf: That’s fair, but it’s more than Trump, too. It’s also some of the commentary on Fox News and in right-wing conspiracy theories. Granted, Trump has had a role in bringing these ideas into the mainstream, but I’d say the problem is bigger than him, too.

perry: But we had a person kill a lot of people while invoking language that the president and his team have regularly used. I don’t think that most Americans view the country as facing an “invasion” of immigrants. Or that most Americans approve of Trump’s language. Other Republicans, like Mitch McConnell, are not talking about immigrant invasions all the time.

So my big questions are: “Will Trump stop invoking these ideas?” and “Will the Republican Party push him to stop?” I think the answer to both these questions is maybe.

Do others agree?

sarahf: I don’t know. Right now there seems to be more of a distancing from the language Trump and his team has used more than a rebuke. Trump’s acting White House chief of staff, for instance, told ABC News that he doesn’t think it’s fair to blame Trump and that the problem predates his administration.

ameliatd: Right, the answer so far seems to be that these shootings haven’t yet convinced Trump’s allies to start condemning his language.

natesilver: Not to be too both-sides-y, but let’s not forget the 2017 Congressional baseball shooting in this discussion where a gunman targeted Republican legislators. So, yes, maybe we have a rising tide of political violence overall, of which Trump’s rhetoric plays an important part, but it’s not necessarily the only cause.

perry: But if the White House is emphasizing that it’s opposed to white supremacy Trump may have to stop saying things white nationalists say.

Trump’s re-election campaign has already put out more than 2,000 Facebook ads that include the word “invasion” this year as part of his message on immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to an analysis by The New York Times. So did Saturday end that? I think the answer might be yes. I’m not sure, but that could be at least one potential shift.

natesilver: Do we really expect Trump to back down though? He seems to be convinced that this stuff is central to his re-election efforts. And he’s not the sort of guy who stops doing something just because people tell him to stop doing it.

ameliatd: I also think the fact that he’s being attacked as racist by many of the Democratic candidates could make him dig in even further.

nrakich: The White House also condemned white supremacy after Charlottesville, but of course, Trump later returned to his inflammatory rhetoric.

perry: I think this shooting is different than Charlottesville, though. Or anything else that has happened. People were literally killed by someone who invoked the same language as the president.

I don’t want to suggest something is a game-changer, but I think this is potentially an important moment. Because even if, say, Trump does not change, maybe the Republican Party shifts in some way?

nrakich: A woman died in Charlottesville, too.

I am just skeptical of any claims that “this time it’s different.”

The “invasion” language may disappear in the short term because it will be seen as too inflammatory for the next couple months. But I don’t think there will be any kind of permanent shift.

perry: That’s a reasonable position, and probably the right one.

But if Trump stops describing what’s happening at the southern border as an “invasion,” that would be significant. Words, in my view, do matter.

And that “invasion” framing is really racist.

What I’m really trying to isolate here is that a person killed people using the same words the president has used to stoke fears about immigrants in the U.S.

Does that make what happened in El Paso different than what happened in Charlottesville? “No” is probably the right answer. But I’m not sure.

nrakich: Also, this isn’t the first time during the Trump administration that a gun was used to murder multiple people as part of a hate crime — the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting targeted Jews, for example.

ameliatd: I do think the lack of condemnation from Republicans is significant. When the response is distancing, not censure, that sends a signal to Trump. But I do think you’re right, Perry, that this is an important moment for Trump and the GOP.

sarahf: The gunman also allegedly wrote that his views “predate Trump,” perhaps in anticipation of the blowback. And given that more Republicans haven’t spoken out, I’m not sure how this will change the conversation around gun violence or the fact that Trump’s rhetoric can inspire violence, other than maybe Republicans and Democrats further retreat into their partisan camps.

perry: I don’t think that Americans’ views on gun will change much, in part because most Americans, even a significant bloc of Republicans, already favor a lot of gun control measures. Americans overall are also supportive of immigration and on average are growing less prejudiced since Trump’s election (not more), so I think incidents like the El Paso shooting are likely to further those those trends — not reverse them.

And so I think we’re likely to see more polls showing that certain kinds of racial rhetoric should be out of bounds. For instance, Trump telling female congresswomen of color to “go back” to their countries was very unpopular (although a majority of Republicans said that the attacks were acceptable).

natesilver: The gun control discussion is also REALLY complicated by the fact that Wyoming has as many senators as California. The Senate has big, built-in bias toward rural states, and few issues have a stronger urban-rural divide than guns do.

ameliatd: It’s at least possible that we’ll see some more movement on something like red-flag laws, though, right? These are laws that would help temporarily take guns away from people who are at a high risk of violence, and that have passed in a significant number of states since the Parkland shooting last year. And they seem to be getting some support from Republicans in Congress.

nrakich: The (Republican) governor of Ohio proposed one on Tuesday.

ameliatd: And that’s a policy that the NRA has supported in the abstract — although they’ve also worked to water them down when they’ve actually been introduced.

natesilver: There is some bipartisan support for those kinds of laws. But does it have McConnell’s support? I’d defer to Perry on all things McConnell, but it does seem as if McConnell isn’t the kind of guy who wants to give any victory to gun control advocates, even a small one.

perry: I think the gun policy debate is basically intractable for now. Republicans control the Senate, the presidency and a lot of state governments, and they are not moving on that issue — even if the public becomes even more pro-gun control.

sarahf: So if the debate on gun policy is intractable, like Perry says, where do you see the conversation on Americans’ tolerance for racist rhetoric headed?

perry: I think this racist rhetoric from Trump, Fox News and other parts of the Republican Party can change. And I think it will. Will Trump say racist things in the future? Of course. But I think the worst of it, i.e. the “invasion” rhetoric and telling members of Congress to go back to their countries, might die down.

I’m also not totally convinced that Trump is confident that his racial rhetoric makes great politics. So I think he might try harder to figure out how to speak and act in ways that are critical of immigration but also don’t seem targeted at people of color.

ameliatd: I agree that the conversation about Trump’s rhetoric has more staying power — both because it’s so inflammatory and racist and because it’s connected to his broader anti-immigrant posture. You can’t definitively say that Trump’s language is directly sparking violence, but I do think people intuitively understand that when a president talks this way, it brings radical, fringe-y voices into the mainstream and normalizes them. I guess I’m just not convinced he’s going to tone down his language.

nrakich: I think the answer is “at the margin”? Maybe we see a couple more minor gun laws, maybe a pause in racist rhetoric. But overall, I don’t think the big picture will change very much.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/fivethirtyeight-politics-podcast-trumps-words-incite-violence-64815507

Elsewhere, a man watches as a website he built becomes a bastion of fringe movements with violent rhetoric — a cheering section for mass shootings, where murderers are lionized as heroes.

And in Texas, a lone-wolf shooter posts an anti-immigrant screed online before opening fire at a Walmart.

Did the first two things directly lead to the third? It’s impossible to say. But social scientists say there is evidence to suggest that they’re all linked. As research into terrorism and rare types of violent crimes has become more data-driven, it’s begun to show that the people we call “lone wolves” aren’t. Like the El Paso shooter, they may be isolated in their schools or physical communities, and they don’t have networks of co-conspirators helping to plan attacks. But behind these apparent loners is a sense of community and of participating in a movement. They’ve adopted new norms. They’ve had those norms reinforced. And then they act.

The criminology and terrorism studies communities used to be focused on identifying individuals who were likely to become violent, said Amarnath Amarasingam, professor of religion at Ontario’s Queen’s University and a senior research fellow at the anti-extremism think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Researchers would try and figure out a “type” of person or personality that was likely to become a terrorist or commit acts of violence. “Some of the ways we thought we could identify them were upbringing, poverty, their refugee or immigrant experience, attachment to conflicts back home,” Amarasingam said. But studies comparing these variables have largely failed to turn up any signs of a consistent profile for violent extremism.

“We’ve done some projects looking at communities out of which people travel to Syria” to fight alongside ISIS, he said. “You have all the factors the same. They’re all refugee communities. All come from conflict zones. All characterized by trauma. They’re the same ethnicity, same religion, same age group, same gender. But one person goes to law school and the other goes to Syria.”

Jessie Daniels, a professor of sociology at Hunter College who has studied white supremacists in the U.S. for decades, said her research has found essentially the same thing. There is no profile that can tell you who will pick up a gun, she told me.

But, she said, when people who feel marginalized hear violent rhetoric that tells them another group of people is to blame and deserves punishment, we know someone will.

History suggests as much. “You can go back and look in this country at statistics around lynching. When there is rhetoric in the newspaper about blacks stealing jobs from white people then there is violence that follows it.”

That applies to so-called lone wolves, too. Participation in spaces where violent rhetoric is supported and welcome fosters a sense of community. And that community can be critical to what comes next.

For instance, in 2013, researchers published an analysis of lone-actor terrorism that was based on coding of the characteristics and behaviors of 119 individual terrorists. It’s easy to look at the stats and describe these people as loners — 40 percent were unemployed at the time of their attack; 50 percent were single and had never married; 54 percent were described as angry by family members and people who knew them in real life.

But the analysis also showed that these same people were often involved in ideological communities — communities built online and offline, where future terrorists sought (and often found) support and validation for their ideas. Thirty-four percent had recently joined a movement or organization centered around their extremist ideologies. Forty-eight percent were interacting in-person with extremist activists and 35 percent were doing the same online. In 68 percent of the cases, there’s evidence the “lone wolf” was consuming literature and propaganda produced by other people that helped to shore up their beliefs.

More than half the time, someone knew about the terrorist’s plan before it was carried out. (A fact that also turns up in research on school shootings in the United States.)

There’s been very little empirical research on lone actor terrorists. But what does exist has been enough to convince some researchers that “lone wolf” is a moniker that never should have existed. The ties to communities of extremist thought and social pressure are too strong to ever say someone was truly acting alone.

And that, experts told me, is why the internet has changed the way violent extremism works. In the 1930s, the public rhetoric of someone like the racist, anti-immigrant radio star Father Coughlin could (and did) create a community of violence. In the 1970s, Daniels said, white supremacists published newsletters that fostered community for subscribers.

But the internet has created new ways for those communities to recruit and build. And it’s happening faster than it did before. Daniels began to notice this in the 1990s, when she saw white supremacists launching websites that appeared to be tributes to Martin Luther King Jr., but linked people to documents designed to undermine King’s legacy and build suspicion about the civil rights movement. Today, the same kind of “idea laundering” happens on Twitter, where extremists use trending hashtags to link their ideas to mainstream ones.

And once a person does a search on those ideas, algorithms can very quickly silo them into a reality where extremism is all they see. “If you search for ISIS or neo-Nazis, you’ll get more,” Amarasingam said. “We’ve created brand new YouTube accounts and within a day or two all your recommendations are neo nazi content, just from a couple of searches.”

Meanwhile, the internet has given us more ways to foster friendships outside our physical spaces. Amarasingam is currently studying the communities that form around gaming platforms and how those can become incubators for extremism. These spaces are important, he told me, because they’re exactly the kind of thing that fits into what we know about lone actors. A person can be a white supremacist living in some liberal bastion city. They might have few friends or close relationships physically. They look around, and feel like an oppressed minority. But online, they have friends around the world. They can feel like part of a transnational movement. And when they commit violence, Amarasingam and Daniels said, these people are often saying they did it for that movement, for that community.

“That’s the power of the online space,” Amarasingam said. “People are so obsessed with the content [of video games] that they miss the human aspect. It’s not simply about tweets and Facebook videos. They’re actually becoming friends. They’re helping each other and counseling each other. That connection is quite powerful.”