  The mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school on December 14, 2012
catalyzed a year of active debate and legislation on gun control in the United
States. Social media hosted an active public discussion where people expressed
their support and opposition to a variety of issues surrounding gun
legislation. In this paper, we show how a content-based analysis of Twitter
data can provide insights and understanding into this debate. We estimate the
relative support and opposition to gun control measures, along with a topic
analysis of each camp by analyzing over 70 million gun-related tweets from
2013. We focus on spikes in conversation surrounding major events related to
guns throughout the year. Our general approach can be applied to other
important public health and political issues to analyze the prevalence and
nature of public opinion.
