As a newspaper reporter, I covered my first school shooting in 2007 at Virginia Tech, where 32 students and faculty were murdered and 17 others were wounded. In one story, I recounted how Emily, a 19-year-old sophomore, was lying partially behind a desk on the floor of her French class while the shooter gunned down her teacher and nearly every student around her before shooting himself in the head. I can’t forget the image of Emily, shot twice herself, who pretended to be dead but surreptitiously grabbed a cellphone on the floor that another student had used to call 911 before he was shot. I listened many weeks later to a recording of the call. At first, she was too terrified to speak. All the police dispatcher could hear was the sound of her breath and the loud pop pop pop of gunfire all around her.
“I can’t talk,” she whispered, gasping for breath. “Please hurry.”
After the Virginia Tech massacre, I reported on many other school shootings, including Sandy Hook in 2012, when twenty 6- and 7-year-olds were shot to death in their first-grade classrooms and six staff members were killed. Attorney General Eric Holder, whom I covered at the time as The Washington Post’s Justice Department reporter, told me that walking through the bullet-riddled classrooms still caked with blood was the most difficult day of his professional life. He later cried openly when he saw the crime-scene photos of the children lying dead in their classrooms.
I wrote about so many school massacres that I lost count. After each one, I reached out to the National Rifle Association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (the gun industry’s trade association), and other organizations that the nation’s gun lobby comprises for their response. They rarely commented beyond a statement offering thoughts and prayers to the victims and their families. I twice attended the world’s largest firearms trade show, held annually in Las Vegas for tens of thousands of gun makers, sellers, and other professionals but closed to the general public. There, too, leaders of the NRA, other advocates, and representatives of the multibillion-dollar gun industry would not comment on school shootings, except to reiterate their support for armed guards in schools and a government registry of mentally ill people, and to resist calls to strengthen background checks and restrict access to semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15.
[William H. Frist: The politics of gun safety are changing. I should know.]
But the gun lobby had another response to school shootings behind the scenes—one I didn’t know about at the time. A study by Stanford University researchers this year found that after fatal school shootings, pro-gun political-action committees dramatically increased their contributions to their preferred U.S. House candidates in the districts where the shootings occurred, when those races were competitive. These shifts in spending were not observed after other incidents of mass gun violence or after nonfatal school shootings—only when children were killed in schools. Over the many years that I reported on gun violence, the gun lobby’s enormous campaign spending was no secret. But the Stanford study reveals how these groups targeted their money, raising their aggressive tactics to a new level.
In the first study of its kind, the authors analyzed 25 years of data, linking campaign-finance records to every fatal K–12 school shooting from 2000 to 2024. They then compared campaign contributions between the districts that did and did not have a school shooting. After school shootings where children died, pro-gun contributions to candidates in competitive congressional districts increased on average by more than 30 percent. And when the shooting occurred within two months of an election, contributions surged by 2,820 percent. “The data shows that the gun lobby saves its political firepower for the moments when public grief is greatest and lawmakers are under the most pressure to act,” Eric A. Baldwin, one of the authors, told me.
In November 2021, for example, a 15-year-old killed four students and injured seven other people at Oxford High School, in Michigan. The pro-gun PACs contributed $50,650 during the 2021–22 election cycle in the district where the high school was located, a 434 percent increase from the previous cycle and a 591 percent increase from an average of the previous five cycles, according to the Stanford researchers. In December 2013, a 17-year-old senior was killed at Arapahoe High School, in a suburb of Denver. Before the shooting, the pro-gun PAC contribution had been $1,000. Afterward, it soared to $49,470.
Gun-safety PACs also increased their spending in competitive districts after school shootings. But the pro-gun groups were by far the dominant spenders until 2018, the year of the Parkland shooting, which left 17 students and faculty dead at a high school in Florida; at that point, gun-safety groups began to significantly increase their spending, sometimes equaling or even surpassing the spending of the pro-gun groups.
The Stanford researchers did not find that increased spending by either side after fatal school shootings measurably affected which party actually won a competitive House election. (The districts that the study looked at represent only a subset of the gun lobby’s overall election spending.) Nevertheless, the study shows how pro-gun PACs work to undermine anti-gun feelings in communities suffering from the trauma of children being killed in schools.
In poll after poll for more than a decade, the majority of Americans have favored stricter gun laws. Most Americans specifically want a ban on weapons such as AR-15s, and also favor stricter background checks. That sentiment is particularly acute after a school shooting, when “public demand for reform is especially high,” according to the Stanford researchers. But, they write, the pro-gun spending surge means that “instead of yielding to constituent pressure, candidates are fortified to resist it and are empowered to reframe their opposition to reform as principled rather than unresponsive.”
[Tyler Austin Harper: ‘How much blood is your fun worth?’]
Although the NRA’s power has been waning in recent years, it still spent $10 million in the 2024 election. Other pro-gun groups have emerged and are influencing national policy; together with the NRA, they spend about $14 million a year on lobbying. In response to lawsuits from a number of pro-gun entities, including Gun Owners of America, a federal judge in Texas recently found unconstitutional a 1934 federal law that placed strict requirements on anyone purchasing silencers, short-barreled rifles, and shotguns, among other firearms. The Justice Department did not immediately appeal the ruling.
In recent months, the Trump administration has announced new actions to make it easier for gun purchasers to avoid background checks when obtaining firearms. In April, then–Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and other Justice Department officials announced the rollback of gun regulations alongside leaders from the NRA, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the National Association for Guns Rights, and Gun Owners of America. And House Republicans proposed a bill to cut nearly $300 million from the budget of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the agency that enforces the nation’s gun laws.
The killing of America’s children and teenagers in their classrooms has become normalized. From a young age, our children and grandchildren are being taught vocabulary and math alongside lessons in how to hide when an “active shooter” storms their classrooms. The Stanford study is a compelling reminder of how far the gun lobby will go to block any efforts to protect our children.