Jack Kappelman

Jack Kappelman is a PhD candidate in Political Science at UCLA. His research examines how citizens respond to political signals and how institutional contexts shape behavior, markets, and policy. Much of his work focuses on the politics of firearm ownership and gun violence, exploring how partisan control over state and local governments influences enforcement patterns, purchasing behavior, and legislative responses to mass shootings. He also investigates the spatial dynamics of firearm violence, using high-resolution geographic data to uncover relationships between place, politics, and gun harm. At UCLA, he is a member of the Practical Causal Inference Lab and an affiliate of the California Center for Population Research.