Violent Political Rhetoric, Income Inequality, and Mass Shootings

Background and Purpose: The National Association of Social Workers has deemed mass shootings in the U.S. a public health crisis. The need for Social Work involvement in addressing this crisis has been emphasized. In addition to the injuries and deaths of victims, mass shootings have had numerous effects on life in the U.S. Many in the U.S. have at least some degree of anxiety about threats to the safety of loved ones as well as themselves. Numerous causes of mass shootings have been hypothesized, including unemployment, poverty, and income inequality. Recently there has been speculation that violent political rhetoric (VPR) may be associated with mass shootings. However, while studies have investigated the relationship between hate crimes and violence associated with VPR, no study has yet investigated the relationship between VPR and mass shootings. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the relationship between the rates of mass shootings in the U.S. over the last 38 years and the rates of VPR, controlling for poverty, income inequality, and unemployment. This is the first study to investigate this relationship.

Methods: This study involved the analysis of 38 years of time series data on income inequality as measured by the GINI index, the U3 unemployment rate, the U.S. poverty rate, VPR as measured in a recent study by Zeitzoff (2019) and the rate of mass shootings in the U.S. since 1982. An autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) with error correction (EC) time series analysis was used. This approach produced results concerning both short-term and long-term relationships between these variables and the rate of mass shootings in the U.S.

Results: The results showed a statistically significant long-term relationship between income inequality, the rate of VPR, and the rate of mass shootings. The long-term relationship between poverty and mass shootings approached but did not reach the .05 level of statistical significance. Income inequality, poverty, and unemployment had statistically significant short-term effects on mass shootings. The EC term in the ARDL model was statistically significant and suggested short-term deviations from the long-term relationship between VPR and rate of mass shootings were completely eliminated within a single trimester time-period. The R² for the ARDL model adjusted for sample size was .57.

Conclusions and Implications: These findings suggest that as VPR increases, mass shootings increase, and as income inequality increases, mass shootings increase, controlling for poverty and unemployment. These results suggest further research is needed on these relationships in which other variables potentially associated with mass shootings are included. The results also underscore the importance of Social Work involvement in efforts to reduce mass shootings in the U.S. Among other things, Social Workers might develop programs such as empathy training to reduce the potentially dehumanizing effects of VPR on the groups targeted by VPR. Development of policies and interventions to reduce income inequality and to influence candidates for elective office and office holders to lessen their use of VPR are also needed.

Reference: Zeitzoff, T. (2019) The nasty style: Why politicians use violent rhetoric. Available online: https://www.zeitzoff.com/uploads/2/2/4/1/22413724/zeitzoff_nastystyle_violentrhetoric_draft_nov2019.pdf