Opposing Movement Strategy, Critical Events, and Policy Change: How the Gun Control and Gun Rights Movements Capitalize on Mass Shootings

This dissertation explains why both sides of an opposing movement pair make political gains in the contentious, crowded, and shifting political context that follows attention-grabbing, agenda-disrupting events. The literature on policy change in political science and sociology contend that “critical events” are an opportunity to mobilize supporters and secure policy change. But existing research does not explain why, where, or under what conditions opposing political organizations do so. To address this shortcoming, this dissertation uses historical-comparative and ethnographic techniques to analyze over 100 hours of fieldwork; thousands of organizational documents, newspaper articles, and government reports; and informal interviews to determine how gun control and gun rights groups both sought to maximize policy gains in the years after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The analysis demonstrates that gun control groups maximized political gains by shifting their attention to state legislative venues after their initial efforts to secure national legislation failed. Gun rights groups, however, maximized political gains by trusting their allies in Congress to block new gun control legislation and continuing to push legislative goals in favorable state contexts, while using the threat of gun control to mobilize their supporters. This dissertation contributes the literatures on social movements, organizational strategy, and policy changes by elaborating a theory of selected contexts, whereby national political organizations prioritize key policy fights in certain state legislatures. A theory of selected contexts is necessary to understand how national political organizations influence local politics under conditions of national political gridlock. This dissertation also contributes to our broader understanding of the politics of violence, particularly the politics of mass shootings