More guns per person perhaps. More guns total is highly unlikely.
Sure hunters own more guns as they use different guns for different game and seasons. But this study doesn’t factor how many guns a person owns. It only factors whether they own guns or their attitudes toward gun laws. Don’t try to make this about one region versus another . Racism exists everywhere. Haven’t you noticed the racial profiling in NY? (The least rural area in America.)
America has a unique history with both racism against blacks and with guns. I imagine these results are very specific to America.
Obvious statement is obvious.
Well, I would prefer the headline “American racists more likely to own guns” than “racists more likely to own guns” but I do agree that for anyone who understands how studies like this word and actually looks at it my conclusion is obvious.
This chap is pretty close to the mark. Its clear he has read the paper and understood it.
Fox News created the headline not us. best Kerry, we are far more cautious regards what we say about the results. Fox is more perhaps about creating fear and anger, and they have achieved this from what I can see. best Kerry
Whenever I hear that, I think of this:
Gun owners don’t care about these particular statistics. Gun owners feel like they have a pretty good handle on whether or not they might be suicidal or if they might be likely to murder their spouse after a fight. If you, as an individual, feel like you’re not inclined to do either of these things, these statistics don’t dissuade you from keeping a gun in your home. Even if people, as a whole, who have guns in their homes are more likely to murder their spouses, most people are probably thinking that this is an escalation of what would have been a beating in a home with no guns. If that’s true, and you’re not the type to beat your spouse, than you’re not going to think such statistics affect you too much. If you wouldn’t beat your spouse you probably wouldn’t shoot them.
Gun owners are far more concerned about accidents because they, like anyone else, feel like they have knowledge of and control over the things they might do deliberately with their weapons. But the stories of “accidents” you hear all like things you read in this article where a child finds a loaded, unsecured, unattended firearm and accidentally pulls the trigger. In fact, one of the articles linked from that one says:
[quote]Police said their investigation found that 26-year-old Michael Norman was in the apartment babysitting a group of children while their mother was away. Norman told police he felt the apartment complex – where he didn’t live – was dangerous, and he brought a Ruger 9mm handgun with him as a precaution.
Norman told police he went to sleep at about 3 a.m. May 12 and that all the children were asleep. According to his statement, the firearm was left on the kitchen table, where it was unsecured, visible and accessible by others in the apartment, including children.[/quote]
These stories go well beyond "accident"and into negligence, in some cases, criminal negligence (where such thing are illegal, like in California). These are just incredibly stupid acts by the most irresponsible of irresponsible people. I have never once read a story about a child finding a locked and unloaded gun and accidentally killing someone with it. I have never even heard a story where a child found a gun that was either locked or unloaded and killed someone with it.
When people see these statistics but think, “well, I’m not suicidal, there’s no domestic violence in my home, and I will store then gun locked up” they are not likely to be particularly worried about these sorts of statistics. Nobody ever collects statistics like “of all children involved in firearms incidents, how many acquired a gun that was locked up” or “how likely is a firearm to increase the chances of spousal murder in a home with no history of domestic abuse or drug use?” etc.
The title “Are Gun Owners More Racist” is wrong (for fsck’s sake, learn to interpret data before you make such an erroneous conclusion, thank you.)
The study says plainly that people who identify as racists are more likely to own a gun. Not the other way around.
Shibboleth.
My recollection is that reducing access to the means of suicide is considered by the WHO as a successful means of reducing numbers of suicides, but that there will always be substitution that limits the success of this strategy.
In Australia, firearms suicides began a downward trend 15 years before the 1996 firearms possession restrictions, and I don’t see any knee in the trend graph that can be related to the act. The overall number of suicides actually increased immediately following*, but has been falling quite dramatically. I think the drop in overall numbers can be attributed to the National Suicide Prevention Strategy (NSPS).
*(papers with abstracts such as “Suicide methods employed by young Australians are changing, with a disturbing rise in frequency of hanging and car exhaust suicides slightly offset by a decline in firearm suicides.” were seen in the 90’s)
I’m pretty sure I didn’t say that there is no racism where I live, merely that there is no reason, based on this study, to suspect that where I live people with greater racial prejudice are more likely than people with lower racial prejudice to own guns.
No blame directed your way, or really any blame for anything. Just explaining myself to someone who has apparently decided that pointing out that this study is American and shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions about non-Americans makes me stupid and, apparently, racist.
I know that racism exists everywhere. That’s kind of my point. I also know that gun ownership in San Francisco is a hell of a lot lower than it is in, say, Montana, and that racists exist in San Francisco, but they probably don’t own guns, and that’s probably more of a regional variation.
This seems like a specific symptom of a more general way of thinking. Speeding leads to more and more fatal car accidents, but that doesn’t matter to me because I’m a good driver. Advertising affects the way people think and the product choices they make but I’m not influenced by it.
People think they are exceptions to statistics pretty much every time, but the people who speed and get in an accident thought they were good drivers too. The people who killed themselves of their family members with a gun thought they were safer for buying it in the first place (in many cases, there are plenty of cases where people buy guns specifically to harm themselves or others, I’m sure).
Wow, thanks for the link to the Plosone study. I skimmed over the study and I cannot help but wonder if specifically categorizing whites, and white gun owners as racists it bigotry in itself.
They could be racist and homophobic, as they’re married to white women, not black men. Fuck knows. My head hurts.
Perhaps fear and anger are the root causes of both gun ownership and racism?
Ask Kerry. He’s the study’s creator and is here now.
Thanks for the link to the “symbolic racism” scale. Reading those questions made me mad, just asking those questions is racist.
