Mass Shootings: Which Gun Laws Work
An interview with Prof. John J. Donohue III
Mass shootings have become disturbingly common in the United States. 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 2019, Joel Cohen sits down with Professor John J. Donohue III of Stanford Law School, an economist and empirical legal scholar who has spent decades studying guns and crime. Donohue traces how the Supreme Court's reading of the Second Amendment shifted from a militia-based right to a personal one, explains what the data show about guns, homicide, suicide, and mass shootings, and takes on the claim that armed citizens stop active shooters. He then turns to policy: right-to-carry laws, assault-weapon and high-capacity-magazine limits, universal background checks, red-flag laws, gun buybacks, and the immunity statute that shields gun makers from many lawsuits, and compares the American approach with those of Australia and New Zealand.
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. 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 magazine-limit case in which Donohue testified, now Duncan v. Bonta, was upheld by the full Ninth Circuit in 2025, and the Supreme Court has agreed to take up challenges to state assault-weapons bans, so the questions he flagged are again before the Court.
Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in 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, and partly closed the "boyfriend loophole." There is still no federal assault-weapons ban or universal background-check requirement, and roughly 20 states now have red-flag laws. Gun deaths remain high: about 44,000 Americans died from gunfire in 2024, a majority of them by suicide, even as gun homicides have fallen from their 2021 peak. Mass shootings such as Uvalde (2022) and Lewiston (2023) have kept the debate over the measures Donohue discusses at the center of American politics.
About Prof. John J. Donohue III
“The great fear in implementing a death penalty regime is executing the innocent.”
John J. Donohue III, one of the leading empirical researchers in legal academia, is an economist, lawyer, and a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. He is well known for using empirical analysis to determine the impact of law and public policy in a wide range of areas, including civil rights and anti-discrimination law, employment discrimination, crime and criminal justice, and school funding. Previously, Professor Donohue was a member of the Stanford Law School faculty from 1995 to 2004 and then spent six years at Yale Law School as the Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor.
