On the day after a deadly mass shooting in the United States, when media coverage and internet searches reach their peak, traffic fatalities appear to spike, a new study has found.
The finding, published on Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry, suggests only that there is a link between deadly shootings and a rise in fatal car accidents; it does not demonstrate cause and effect. But the study, by researchers at Harvard Medical School, raises the question of whether there is a causal relationship, and if so, what the mechanism behind it might be.
The study examined traffic fatalities before and after deadly mass shootings in the United States from 2008 to 2023. On the day after the 10 shootings that had the highest death toll — with 13 to 58 people having been killed — deaths from car accidents increased by 14.3 percent on average, when compared with the average daily traffic toll during the 10 days preceding the event, meaning that about 20 additional lives were lost on the roads.
Dr. Anupam B. Jena, a physician and economist at Harvard Medical School and the paper’s senior author, said that he and his colleagues believed there was likely a causal relationship between the shootings and the traffic fatalities.
“We think the shootings create an environment where several things are happening,” he said. “You’re driving, you’re getting pinged on your phone, you’re seeing a lot of breaking alerts, people are calling you — you are literally distracted.”
But some experts on gun violence were more skeptical.
“To suggest that the nearly 20 more motor vehicle deaths on the day following a high-profile mass shooting was anything but a coincidence is methodologically unsound and impossible to validate,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, the executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany. She cautioned that the report could provoke unnecessary alarm.
Other experts said they were skeptical of the study at first, and that they were concerned that the main conclusion had been based on only 10 deadly mass shootings. But several also noted that the paper’s authors went to great lengths to make sure that the findings were sound, including looking more broadly at 100 of the deadliest mass shootings and still finding an increase in traffic accidents, albeit a smaller one.
James Densley, a founder of the nonprofit Violence Prevention Project Research Center based at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minn., said that the study was a “well-built natural experiment,” and that the pattern “is hard to explain as a fluke.”
“Does it make sense, or is it coincidence?” he asked. “It makes sense, and the authors worked hard to rule out chance.”
He noted that other studies have shown that car crash fatalities increase when income taxes are due in the United States. Some research has also linked mass shootings to mental health consequences, including an increase in prescriptions for antidepressants for young people.
“There is also psychological distraction” for people driving following a shooting, Dr. Jena said. “You get an alert that 58 people were killed in a mass shooting, and that has a psychological impact — you’re thinking about something else while you should be thinking about driving.”
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