ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that whether or not we observe the politicization of gun control after a rampage shooting should be related to the event's magnitude in objective terms. It discusses that the relative amount of media coverage an event receives can be understood as an indicator of the event's perceived severity which is not necessarily solely related to the number of victims. The chapter describes the existence of a partisan cleavage on gun control should facilitate the political treatment of the issue after a rampage shooting. Before discussing the actual fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), it is important to make the used data sources and the process of the set calibration as transparent as possible in order to enable the reader to gauge the soundness of the empirical analysis. The chapter introduces the way the concepts of event severity, media attention, partisan cleavage and electoral cycle have been operationalized and measured.
