figure 1: Mass shooting deaths (blue, left scale) and injuries (brown, right scale). Shades of grey indicate the prohibition of offensive weapons; orange indicates the Trump administration. source: mother jones Accessed 2 May 2022, author’s calculations.
Note that it seems to correlate with the assault weapons ban (reverse) and the Trump administration (positive).
To perform a statistical analysis of these correlations, I constructed a “mass shooting casualties” variable, which is the sum of the two variables above.
figure 1: Mass shooting deaths (blue variables) and injuries (brown bars). The total height is “mass fire casualties”. Shades of grey indicate the ban on assault rifles; orange indicates the Trump administration. source: mother jones Accessed 2 May 2022, author’s calculations.
Estimates 1990M01-2022M05 (as of 5/25 May) using negative binomial regression, ban is a dummy variable for assault weapons ban, trump is a Trump administration dummy variable, and pop is the population in the thousands.
casualtiesTon = –1.72 – 0.71 prohibitTon + 1.45 trump cardTon + 0.00001Pop musicTon
adjust -R2 = 0.045, SER = 33.4, NOBS = 363. Bold indicates significance at 10% msl, with standard errors corrected for overdispersion (GLM option in EViews).
In other words, the number of people injured or killed each year is reduced by 71% under the assault weapons ban. By contrast, total casualties were 145% higher in every year of the Trump administration.
