Unsurprising, given that the second amendment was itself an assurance given to slave holders that the Federal government would not be able to keep guns in the hands of those who needed to preserve “the peace.”
Link goes to a fluff piece. Study here - http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0077552
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
I’m not familiar with the historical perspective you are referencing. Anywhere you would care to point at for me to go learn?
Outline of the “symbolic racism” scale:
http://condor.depaul.edu/phenry1/SR2Kinstructions.htm
I believe a lot of gun owners would call that “revisionist” history.
I have a broken shotgun. Does that make me a broken racist?
All history beyond bare charts, numbers, graphs, and facts is revisionist to some degree or another in my mind - It is in the… interpreting the interpretations? That some really interesting things can be found.
Does that mean that there is a 50% chance that I am a racist since I own a gun? … I’m confused.
I would be interested to see similar research done into the connection between sexism and guns. White men kill more white women with guns then they do black men.
I’m not any kind of Constitutional scholar, and this view is, to put it mildly, controversial.
No no no. I don’t own a gun, so there’s a 50% chance I’m not a racist. You, on the other hand, are 1 point more racist. Learn statistics, for pete sakes!
I wonder. Does owning a gun make you more likely to be a racist?
Repeat after me:
“Correlation is not causation”.
pgt
Knowing nothing else about a person, if you dip into the population and pull out two people, one a gun-owner and one not, there is a slightly higher chance that the gun owner rates high on the same racism scale used in the study. But how much higher depends on the distribution of racism and gun ownership in the population, which I can’t find figures for.
Say 800 of a population of 1000 are racists, and 1.5% of them have guns, 50% more chance than the 1% of the non-racists who have guns. Then you pull out a random gun owner, chances are he is one of the 12 racist gun-owners rather than the 2 non-racists with guns (about 86%). But also, a non-gun owner is still probably one of the 788 racist non-gun owners rather than the 198 non-racist gun owners (just under 80%).
It’s a weak test for racism compared to, for example, asking them what it is about Obama they most dislike.
Hi, you guys are great, I love the responses, I’m the lead author of the study on racism and guns. No if you own a gun it doesn’t make you a racist. Its probabilistic, but please read the paper (see link below) and share with similarly enlightened friends please. Think this “its true that all seagulls are birds, but not all birds are seagulls” see link to full paper not the Fox News misrepresentation of the paper please. Take care Kerry.
Good for you - cool of you to visit!
I’m looking for more positive coverage than the extreme emails I have been receiving from the far right, even from Tea Party members, so I decided to have a moderate intelligent alert on commentary. Late here in Australia, will be leaving you soon to sleep, take care, best Kerry
Of course, since everything is caused by something, correlation of two phenomena is a hint that it might be worth looking at their causes to see if there is a correlation between them too.
e.g. assume some angry uneducated people who live in a complex world they don’t fully understand: there may be a correlation between their (a) blaming outgroups, and (b) carrying weapons to protect them from the simple threats they do understand.
You are correct correlation does not equal causation, tricky with this issue to test, but your thinking is good on this issue regards the possible explanatory variables. best Kerry
