Stanford Legal

Guns, Money, and Mass Shootings

2025-09-15

Frequent mass shootings are a distinctly American problem, with news of another tragic shooting grabbing our attention every few weeks. Yet policy change is stalled.In this episode, we focus on an important reason for the congressional paralysis—the gun lobby. John Donohue, one of the country’s leading experts on the empirical study of law and public policy, and Eric Baldwin, a research fellow at Stanford Law, join us for a discussion about their new research paper, "Another Shooting, Another Contribution From the Gun Lob...

Frequent mass shootings are a distinctly American problem, with news of another tragic shooting grabbing our attention every few weeks. Yet policy change is stalled.

In this episode, we focus on an important reason for the congressional paralysis—the gun lobby. John Donohue, one of the country’s leading experts on the empirical study of law and public policy, and Eric Baldwin, a research fellow at Stanford Law, join us for a discussion about their new research paper, "Another Shooting, Another Contribution From the Gun Lobby." They reveal how both gun rights and gun safety PACs flood competitive districts with donations in the wake of deadly shootings. The result? A high-stakes stalemate that helps preserve the status quo, despite overwhelming public support for measures like universal background checks. With Donohue’s decades of scholarship on crime and policy and Baldwin’s insights into political science and lobbying, the episode offers a timely look at how money and ideology shape one of the country's most polarizing debates and offers an examination of a grim reality: mass shootings have become more frequent, but meaningful reform rarely follows. Against the backdrop of rising political violence, the conversation probes the sometimes-surprising role of campaign donations and interest-group maneuvering in shaping what legislators do—or fail to do—after mass shooting tragedy.

Links:

John Donohue >>> Stanford Law page
Eric Baldwin >>> Stanford Law page
Takuma Iwasaki >>> Stanford Law page
“Financial Firepower: School Shootings and the Strategic Contributions of Pro-Gun Pacs” >>> Stanford Law page

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