The sad fact is mass shootings are all too common in this country. Each one takes a horrific toll on the victims, their families, and anyone close by. But is the impact even broader than that?

I recently ran across an article that explores this in more detail: “The Death Toll of a Mass Shooting Doesn’t End at the Scene” by Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham and Anupam Jena on the Time.com website.

Start with the idea that anything that induces stress and is distracting encourages more accidents. For example, In the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, fatal car crashes increased.  Some of this can be explained because air travel decreased in favor of cars, but there was also evidence that crashes per miles driven also increased. Is there a link between the nationwide fear & stress that the attack triggered and the resulting increase in accidents?

Going one step further, if such tragedies can cause widespread fear and stress to the point of distracted driving, could mass shootings cause the same reaction?

It seems plausible because almost two-thirds of Americans say mass shootings are a significant source of stress. After these events, antidepressant use rises among teenagers living near a school shooting, and gun purchases made in response to these events lead to more accidental gun deaths. 

Regarding automobile accidents, researchers examined a federal database of every fatal crash on U.S. roads combined with FBI data on mass shootings over a 15-year period. The number of traffic deaths in the days just before each shooting were compared to the number the day after. The day after was used because that’s when these events get the most publicity.

What they discovered was traffic deaths rose by an average of 14.3%, about 20 additional deaths nationwide, on the day after the 10 mass shootings with the most fatalities. In other words, the extra deaths on the road were about 75% of the number of people killed in the shootings themselves.

To make sure this wasn’t a coincidence, the analysis was repeated 10,000 times using fake, random dates for the event dates. A spike of the same magnitude only occurred once with fake data. Perhaps the most eye-opening part was the increase applied to nearly every kind of driver, region, and weather condition, and it persisted even in states far from the shooting.

Unfortunately, a study of this type doesn’t offer any solutions. Perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn is the toll from a catastrophic event, like a mass shooting, is greater than what we could ever imagine.

Tor read more about the methodology, visit https://time.com/article/2026/08/09/the-death-toll-of-a-mass-shooting-does-not-end-at-the-scene/?