Financial Firepower: School Shootings and the Strategic Contributions of Pro-Gun PACs

Fatal school shootings often spark support for stricter gun laws, threatening the gun lobby’s influence and agenda. To prevent political fallout, do pro-gun Political Action Committees increase contributions after fatal school shootings? Leveraging a novel dataset of pro-gun PAC contributions and school shooting incidents, we implement a difference-in-differences design with staggered treatment adoption to estimate the causal effect of school shootings on contributions to House candidates. We find that pro-gun PACs increase contributions by 30.2% to candidates in districts with fatal school shootings, but show no significant response to non-fatal school shootings or other mass shootings. The temporal pattern reveals strategic behavior: contribution spikes emerge in the wake of fatal school shootings and in proximity to elections, with effects dramatically amplified as Election Day approaches; within two months of Election Day, contributions increase by 1,730%. These effects are concentrated in competitive districts (margins of ≤ 5%). Our findings provide robust evidence that pro-gun PACs deploy targeted financial contributions in response to school shootings, with the magnitude and timing suggesting a strategic counter-mobilization effort to maintain influence in affected districts when gun policy becomes locally salient and elections are near. Our findings underscore a gap in democratic accountability: while public opinion should drive policy change, organized interests with financial power can insulate political candidates from public pressure and obstruct its translation into legislative reform.