Economic Disadvantage and Mass Shootings Across U.S. States, 2018 to 2024: A State-Level Panel Analysis

In the United States, the question of what drives mass shootings has long dominated public conversation, often narrowing down to two familiar suspects: the availability of firearms and the prevalence of mental illness. For years, policymakers and the public have debated whether stricter gun laws or better mental health care would be the most effective way to stop these tragedies. Yet, a quieter, less discussed factor has often been overlooked: the economic conditions of the places where these events occur. While it is well understood that poverty and inequality can strain communities, the specific relationship between a state's economic health and its rate of mass shootings has remained unclear. This gap in understanding matters because if the root causes are economic, then the solutions might need to look very different from the usual debates about legislation or healthcare.

A new study by independent researcher Safaa Dabagh takes a fresh look at this issue by examining data from all fifty U.S. states over a seven-year period, from 2018 to 2024. The researcher did not look at individual people or specific shooters; instead, the study treated each state as a single unit of analysis, counting how many mass shootings occurred there each year. The definition used for a mass shooting was broad: any incident where four or more people were shot, regardless of whether they died. This approach captured a wide spectrum of community gun violence, noting that the vast majority of these incidents were not mass killings, but rather events where people were injured. By comparing these counts against state-level data on poverty rates, the strength of gun laws, and the percentage of adults with serious mental illness, the study aimed to see which of these factors moved in step with the frequency of shootings.

The first thing the data revealed was a sharp and sustained rise in violence. After 2019, the number of mass shootings across the country roughly doubled and remained at that elevated level through 2024. While the study could document this surge, it could not explain the sudden jump, as the state-level characteristics measured were relatively stable over time. However, when the researcher looked at the differences between states, a clear pattern emerged regarding economic hardship. States with higher poverty rates consistently experienced more mass shootings per million residents. Specifically, for every single percentage point increase in a state's poverty rate, the rate of mass shootings rose by about 15 percent. This link was strong enough that the ten states with the highest poverty rates had 1.7 times as many shootings per person as the ten states with the lowest poverty rates.

This connection between poverty and violence held up even when the researcher tested it in different ways. The finding remained true even if one state was removed from the calculation, and it persisted when states were compared only to their neighbors within the same geographic region. The study also checked whether this pattern was simply a reflection of other known factors, such as the percentage of Black residents in a state or the overall level of income inequality. While the share of Black residents was also strongly linked to higher shooting rates—a connection the author interprets as a marker of historical segregation and concentrated disadvantage rather than a cause in itself—poverty remained a significant predictor even after accounting for it. In fact, the study found that poverty and low median household income were so closely tied together that the data could not separate their individual effects; where one was high, the other was almost always low.

In contrast, the other two major factors often cited in public debate showed no clear connection to the data. The strength of a state's gun laws, measured by a letter grade system, did not show a consistent relationship with mass shooting rates. While some regional comparisons suggested a link, the overall national picture showed no clear pattern, and the study concluded that state-level data is too broad to determine whether gun laws work or not. Similarly, the percentage of adults with serious mental illness in a state was not a reliable guide to where shootings happened. In fact, the data initially suggested that states with higher rates of mental illness had slightly fewer shootings, but this finding was fragile and disappeared when other factors were considered. The study emphasizes that this result is about state-level statistics and does not reflect the risk posed by individuals with mental health conditions.

The most striking geographic finding was how concentrated these events were. While mass shootings occurred in over a thousand different cities and counties, a tiny fraction of places accounted for a huge portion of the total. Just twenty cities or counties held 32 percent of all the incidents recorded during the study period. In many states, a single city or county was responsible for nearly half of all the shootings. This clustering suggests that the problem is not spread evenly across the landscape but is deeply rooted in specific, high-poverty neighborhoods.

The study concludes that where poverty and disadvantage concentrate, mass shootings concentrate too. The author argues that prevention resources should be directed toward these specific places, and that economic investment in high-poverty areas is a path worth testing alongside gun policy. However, the research stops short of claiming that reducing poverty will automatically stop shootings; it establishes a strong association, not a guaranteed cause-and-effect relationship. The findings also make it clear that state-level mental illness rates are not a useful guide for predicting where violence will occur, and that state-wide gun law grades are too coarse to judge the effectiveness of legislation. Ultimately, the paper suggests that to understand and prevent mass shootings, we must look beyond the usual suspects of guns and mental health to the economic realities of the communities where these tragedies unfold.