Community, faith, and public violence: A county-level examination of religious institutions and mass public shootings in the United States

ABSTRACT Americans confront public forms of violence on a strikingly regular basis. Shootings within schools, religious institutions or simply crowded spaces have attracted significant media attention. The question remains, then, as to what role, if any, can existing institutions play in mitigating these factors – and, if so, what institutions? I argue that the presence of religious institutions will decrease the likelihood of a mass public shooting occurring. Religious institutions are particularly effective at building social capital. Mass public shootings in particular speak to widespread alienation from parochial environments. I test this theory using county-level data on religious congregations and mass public shootings for the lower 48 states. I find that that over the range of religious congregation presence, the likelihood of a mass public shooting declines from 1 in 40 to effectively zero. This result is robust across multiple definitions of ‘mass public shooting’ but decreases in effectivity as the definition is broadened to other types of mass shootings. This study fills a well-documented void of county-level structural analysis in the existing literature.