Newtown, Parkland, and Uvalde: Why (Some) Mass Shootings Transform Community Mental Health

Abstract

Some of the most horrific tragedies in the past 15 years transformed federal community mental health policy. On December 14, 2012, a shooter killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and on May 22, 2022, a shooter murdered 21 people at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Newtown led to Congress adopting a bill that ruptured three decades of community mental health policy impasse. Uvalde resulted in a law that substantially expanded the program created after Newtown. But this policymaking process was a long time coming. Legislators introduced each bill over 10 times before enactment after Newtown and Uvalde. What happened between these mass shootings and policy adoption that led political actors to awaken the paralyzed policy area of community mental health policy?

The Newtown and Uvalde shootings increased the likelihood of adopting community mental health legislation by motivating political actors to adapt existing bills to become the perceived solution to a problem prioritized by each event: mental illness allegedly causing violence. I build on existing research examining this coupling process by explaining adaptation granularly. Newtown and Uvalde incentivized political actors to make two adaptations to existing legislation. First, each mass shooting motivated politicians to adapt their rhetoric describing the bill and policy entrepreneurs to modify the legislation's design. These adaptations attached the bills to the problem garnering attention, and this link carried the bills through the legislative process toward enactment.

However, political actors did not modify or adopt related community mental health bills after a similar incident on February 14, 2018 in Parkland, Florida, where a shooter killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Understanding what happened after Newtown, Parkland, and Uvalde will be crucial to explaining why some mass shootings lead political actors to adapt and adopt community mental health policy reforms.

I employ a most similar systems design that compares akin cases except for the studied phenomenon. Newtown, Parkland, and Uvalde share many features. A male pupil murdered students and staff at his former school. Each shooting heightened attention to the problem of mental illness allegedly causing violence, creating an incentive to adapt existing policies to become the solution to this issue. Lawmakers had introduced related community mental health bills only months before each shooting. And a bipartisan coalition led by the same four lawmakers sponsored the bills. Why did Newtown and Uvalde catalyze the adaptation of these bills, contributing to their enactment, while Parkland did not?

Lawmakers who possess control over the legislative agenda, which I call agenda setters, are crucial to answering this question. Agenda setters have immense influence over which bills progress through the legislative process and which stagnate in committee. Political actors only engaged in the adaptation process if they judged that agenda setters would not use these controls to prevent the modified bill from progressing through the legislative process. Following Newtown and Uvalde, relevant agenda setters – some Democratic and some Republican – supported the community mental health bills, signaling that their agenda controls would not act as an impediment. Lawmakers occupying these agenda setting positions at the time of Parkland did not offer this support. Together, this research shows that agenda setter support was a necessary condition for political actors to adapt and adopt community mental health policy after a mass shooting.