Mass Shootings Durably Increase the Sale of Alcohol in American Communities

Abstract

Mass shootings are devastating events. Communities can cope with the ensuing trauma in a number of ways, including changing their behavioral patterns. Using point-of-sale data from 35,000 individual retailers, including more than half of all American grocery and drug-store purchases, and all American mass shootings from 2006-2019, we find, in a set of two-way fixed-effects counterfactual analyses, that a mass shooting in a given community (the area covered by the ZIP-3 code) predicts a significant increase in the sales of alcohol that lasts at least two years past the shooting. The effect is especially strong for the subset of mass shootings that take place in public settings, whereas we find no evidence for an increase in alcohol sales in the aftermath of mass shootings that take place in private homes or residences. As alcohol is an accelerant for violence, especially firearm-related violence, we suggest the importance of whole-community-approaches to addressing the trauma of mass shootings.

Keywords: Mass shootings, gun violence, alcohol, community response