ABSTRACT
The goal of this chapter is to compare different circumstances where political penalties may or may not be affected by gun violence. Gun violence is an LGBTQ+ public policy issue. This chapter proposes a conceptual framework that if consistent with Tolerable Inequality to improve our understanding of the role of emotionality, temporality, and the distribution of political penalties in the policy process. Building on the literature on affect, salience, causal stories, and policy entrepreneurship, I identify three aspects that clarify how emotionality impacts the types of issues that receive attention, the speed of policy responses, and the selection of certain solutions. These dimensions include aggregations of high-affect events, the use of policy thresholds to manage problems, people, and time, and affective relief for immediate conditions. I apply these elements in a comparative review of two cases of highly emotional events: the Australian response to the Port Arthur mass shooting in 1996, and the United States response to the Newtown, Connecticut mass shooting in 2013. From this comparison, I propose a new concept of “policy as therapy” to understand the function of policy in relieving political and social distress by distributing how many people care about an issue, how much they care, and for how long.
