But now, it’s backed with science!
The research, published in PLoS One, was led by Dr Kerry O’Brien from The University of Manchester and Monash University and used data from a large representative sample of white US voters.
After accounting for numerous other factors such as income, education and political ideology, the researchers found that for each one point increase (on a scale from one to five) in symbolic racism there was a 50 percent increase in the odds of having a gun in the home and a 28 percent increase in support for policies allowing people to carry concealed guns.
If you support gun rights, or are a gun owner, you’re a racist, and these people aim to prove it! They aim to convince your progressive friends that they aren’t out to disarm fellow citizens, but are out to disarm xenophobic racists! And that makes it OK. Talk about coming to your conclusion and then setting out to prove it, which is kind of the opposite of science.
However, the authors note that this reduction is unsurprising as opposition to bans on guns equates to self interest on behalf of those who already own a gun and do not wish to give it up. And racism was already strongly associated with having a gun in the home.
Admit it, Neandertheal, you’re a racist! Kneel before the power of our science! There’s no way, if you advocate for gun rights, you’re getting out of being a racist in our study.
Dr O’Brien said: “According to a Pew Research Center report the majority of white Americans support stricter gun control, but the results of our study suggest that those who oppose gun reform tend to have a stronger racial bias,  tend to be politically and ideologically conservative and from southern states, and have higher anti-government sentiment.”
But they’ll completely ignore the racist history of gun control. No, let’s not talk about that at all. Own it, opponents of the regime. You’re the racists. Face it!
These people need to be shamed. They need to be exposed and never hear the end of it, and by people who know and understand science better than they do.
The key in the “article” is PLoS, who are a “open access peer-reviewed scientific journal.”
It goes downhill from there :)
http://gunfreezone.net/wordpress/index.php/2013/11/01/zomg-gun-owners-are-racist-and-there-is-a-study-to-prove-it/
I suspect their definition of “racism” is rather broad, loose, and excludes biases against white males.
Symbolic racism? Is that like a burning cross or something?
Funny, isn’t it, that this research is coming from abroad and not coming from the likes of a Phillip Cook, a Garen Wintemute, or a David Hemenway and funded by the Joyce Foundation. If the anti-gun researchers in the US thought the claim of racism was viable, they would have run with it a long time ago.
To calculate “Symbolic Racism”, they no doubt did a careful quantitative evaluation of these primary signifiers and totems:
* white skin, and
* reduced functioning of melanosomes pigment in the epidermis
Unfortunately for white gun owners, they scored extremely highly in these primary ‘racism’ measures. Sorry, scientific proof!
Another tell is that they only did this study on whites.
Do they think other ethnicities cannot be racist? Or did they not want to bother?
Also this has the pretzel logic of Voter ID is racist but Universal Background checks is un-racist.
They’re also assuming that only whites own/value guns. Ector, Blanchard, Lawson, Noir, Zo etc must just be figments of our imaginations…
Sounds like a classic Bayesian error, although I’m sure the study has bigger problems than that.
Dr. John Lott is calling BS on this study and questions their statistics. He re-ran their regression model on the non-whites in the sample and found the same statistically significant relationship for the measure of so-called symbolic racism. As Lott notes, “So are non-whites who are racist against blacks more likely to own a gun? Hardly seems reasonable.”
Link
Here is a better link to Lott’s response
http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/2013/10/some-very-poorly-done-research-racism-gun-ownership-and-gun-control-biased-attitudes-in-us-whites-may-influence-policy-decisions/
@ Rob Crawford:
Correct. They only polled white Americans. They also intentionally compared “Southern vs. other states,” only passingly mentioned black-on-black violence, and only considered “reported” gun ownership (altogether ignoring illegal gun ownership, such as is found among the people who actually engage in intentional violence).
The numbers they have are mostly correct, but leaving out key data points and trends leads to the conclusion that the knuckle-draggin’ gun-totin’ hillbillies from Dixie just want to shoot the sophisticated and educated blacks from Yankeeland.
Which is probably the conclusion they wanted, and so is the one their “study” is tailored to produce.
Oh “gun reform” is it? Would that be the so-called “common sense gun-safety” legislation that aims to put me into prison? Gosh, only a racist would resist such fair treatment!
Time for my own Godwin moment. Has anyone else noticed the parallel between the junk science used to justify mistreating us and the way junk science was used to justify the eugenicists and nazis?
Oh the foreign press and how they badly report on American guns!
See the australian news site
which reports on the junk science guns=racism story. That article has a handy little slideshow “Guns in America”, chock full of propaganda and lies. I especially love slide number six which claims “In 2011 32,163 people died from gun-related crime”. Crime? Suicides as crime?
See this is why the anti-gunners so often lump suicide statistics into murder statistics, as they know how suicides will be misunderstood as criminal murders.
Of course this error from Australia isn’t nearly as bad as one I remember from an issue of the Canadian magazine Macleans back in the 1990’s. In that issue they had an article examining the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which they quoted as “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. Notice what Macleans excised? “of the People”, that’s what! Anti-gunners only see what they want to see.
Wordwrap is not working for comments on many of your posts, including this one. I’ve tried several different browsers without success.
The theme doesn’t handle very long URLs very well. I generally try to fix this when it happens. At some point I’ll fix the CSS. I have fixed it here.
Don’t need wordwrap for FUCK THEM.