Gun Owners Are Racist, According To Academics Using Bad Science

[Kamaji]

Gun Owners Are Racist, According To Academics Using Bad Science

Two new studies advance the dangerous narrative that white people own guns because they are racist and fear black people.

BY: DAN LENNINGTON AND WILL FLANDERS
AUGUST 29, 2022

White people own guns — and oppose gun-control legislation — because they are racist and fear black people. Two new studies advance this dangerous narrative building among our academic elites. While such rhetoric is perhaps unsurprising among political pundits or celebrities, otherwise serious academics are now ascribing racist motives to gun ownership and opposition to gun control. These studies are not only based on a slew of bigoted assumptions, but also bad science.

The University of Wisconsin recently promoted a new study contending that in U.S. counties where black people were enslaved in 1860, gun ownership is higher today. In fact, gun ownership, they say, is correlated to the number of slaves formerly in each county. To support this more-slaves-means-more-guns theory, the authors construct a historical narrative that whites feared newly freed slaves, bought guns for self-defense, and then this fear somehow trickled down over 160 years.

But interestingly enough, just last month, National Public Radio ran a story on how black people are the fastest growing group of gun owners. If gun ownership is a product of white people being racist, then this is quite curious.

The University of Wisconsin study suffers from a series of flaws, even apart from its poisonous premise that white people believe or feel certain things because they are white. You’d never say the same about other races, and we shouldn’t give a pass to academics who traffic in the same type of racism.

Alternative Explanations
In any correlational study like this, one must be concerned about the potential for alternative explanations. And a study with the punchline “because slavery” leaves a lot of room for alternatives. For example, the extent of slavery in southern U.S. counties was far heavier in areas of the south that remain rural to this day. The so-called “Black Belt” of southern agriculture that stretched across Georgia to Mississippi remains heavily agrarian, rural, and impoverished today relative to other parts of the region that have been absorbed into growing metropolises like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Nashville. In these regions, the wide-scale hunting of deer, quail, and even wild boar remains more prominent and may explain higher levels of gun ownership, yet this fact remains unaccounted for in the study.

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Source:  https://thefederalist.com/2022/08/29/gun-owners-are-racist-according-to-academics-using-bad-science/

[Kamaji]

They just can't help themselves.

[DefiantMassRINO]

This is how the average woke Ivy-League college educated limuosine liberal pictures typical gun owners:



... who's buying the first round at the Boar's Nest?

[andy58-in-nh]

As it happens, there are lots of gun owners in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and East St. Louis. And what do they look like?

Or are we talking only about legal gun owners?

[Kamaji]

As it happens, there are lots of gun owners in Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and East St. Louis. And what do they look like?

Or are we talking only about legal gun owners?

[Fishrrman]

"Two new studies advance the dangerous narrative that white people own guns because they are racist and fear black people."

White folks "fear" blacks -- and own guns that might be used to defend themselves -- because blacks behave (as a demographic group) more violently and dangerously than other races. You can look up the crime rates on the net -- the numbers speak for themselves.

Call that "racis'" if you wish.
I do not care.
I call it "common sense".