Mass shootings have become disturbingly common in the United States even as overall crime has fallen for decades. Gun-rights advocates argue that more guns, carried by more people, make the public safer; survivors and gun-safety groups push for tighter regulation. When it comes to the laws that govern guns and violence, what does the evidence actually support?
In this TalksOnLaw interview, recorded in the fall of 2019, Joel Cohen sits down with John J. Donohue III, the C. Wendell and Edith M. Carlsmith Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, an economist and empirical legal scholar who has spent decades studying guns and crime, to separate what the data show from what each side claims.
Counting the Cost
Donohue starts with definitions: there is no agreed threshold for a "mass shooting," and the numbers depend on whether one counts four deaths, six, or any active-shooter incident. He describes the Gilroy Garlic Festival and Dayton shootings of that summer, where police stopped the shooter in 32 seconds and still could not prevent nine deaths, and the ripple effects, from active-shooter drills in elementary schools to a stampede at a San Francisco theater after someone shouted that there was a gun. He then puts mass shootings in the larger picture: roughly 22,000 gun suicides a year at the time, somewhat more than half that in gun homicides, about a thousand accidents, and the rising toll of suicide among older white men.
The Second Amendment and the "Good Guy with a Gun"
Donohue traces the Supreme Court's shift from a militia-based reading of the Second Amendment to the personal right recognized in Heller (2008), a 5–4 decision he says the NRA pursued once it counted five votes, and contrasts a 1791 musket that took 30 seconds to reload with a rifle designed for combat in Vietnam. He takes on the claim that armed citizens stop active shooters, citing the FBI's study of 160 incidents and the Thousand Oaks shooting, where a responding officer was shot five times and then killed by friendly fire. "If somebody jumped into this room and you could put a gun in my hand," he says, "it would be great. The problem is, these are relatively rare events," and arming everyone for them has costs every day.
What the Evidence Supports
Donohue walks through the policy menu with the data in hand: right-to-carry laws, which his research associates with higher violent crime; the 1994 assault-weapons and magazine limits that lapsed in 2004; Australia's 1996 buyback and New Zealand's response to Christchurch; universal background checks, which he illustrates with the Navy Yard shooter who passed every check; red-flag laws, including the Isla Vista shooter's diary entry relieved that police never searched his room; and the 2005 federal immunity statute that shields gun makers from most lawsuits, which he would repeal rather than regulate advertising like the "man card" campaign for the rifle used at Sandy Hook. He closes with comparisons to Japan, England and Switzerland, and a quotation from Judge Wilkinson that telling Americans they are powerless to address mass shootings "would be a body blow to democracy."
What to Know Now
The constitutional landscape Donohue describes has changed substantially. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), the Supreme Court recognized a right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense and replaced the means-end balancing that lower courts had used with a test based on the Second Amendment's text and historical tradition. United States v. Rahimi (2024) upheld the federal ban on gun possession by people under domestic-violence restraining orders, confirming that the right has limits, and in June 2026 the Court held in Wolford v. Lopez that Hawaii could not bar licensed carriers from private property open to the public absent the owner's express consent, and in United States v. Hemani that the federal ban on gun possession by drug users cannot rest on marijuana use alone. The Court also held in Garland v. Cargill (2024) that bump stocks are not machine guns under federal law and in Bondi v. VanDerStok (2025) upheld federal regulation of "ghost gun" kits. The questions Donohue flagged about assault weapons are now squarely before the Court: in June 2026 it granted review in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins on whether the Second Amendment protects AR-15-style rifles, with a decision expected by mid-2027.
Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in June 2022, the first major federal gun legislation in nearly three decades. It added enhanced background checks for buyers under 21, funded state crisis-intervention and red-flag programs, partly closed the "boyfriend loophole," and created federal straw-purchase and trafficking offenses. There is still no federal assault-weapons ban or universal background-check requirement. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia now have red-flag laws, and 29 states allow permitless carry. Gun deaths peaked at about 48,800 in 2021 and fell to about 44,400 in 2024; gun homicides have declined since 2021, but firearm suicides reached a record of more than 27,500 in 2024. Donohue's later research, including a 2025 study of 217 cities over four decades, finds that right-to-carry laws increase gun thefts and reduce police clearance rates for violent crime. Mass shootings such as Uvalde (2022) and Lewiston (2023) have kept the measures he discusses at the center of American politics.
