In article <hSxTJ.19791$d0Y8.19773@fx31.iad>
Rudy Crayola <Meth@Amphetamin.com> wrote:
>
> Take those academics out to the black woods and shoot them.
>

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

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.

Next, the authors peddle a sort of �Facebook-friend racism
theory� that is, charitably speaking, laughable. The authors
propose that counties that are more socially connected with
southern counties have higher rates of gun ownership.
Apparently, having a southern Facebook friend makes you afraid
of black people. Again, several alternative explanations come to
mind. Most importantly, one would expect non-slave-holding
counties located near slave-holding counties to have both social
ties and a similar culture of gun ownership. The paper did not
account for this. Additionally, with the increasing mobility of
Americans, it is unclear that ties to someone who lives in an
area that once had slaves bear any relationship to that area�s
slave-owning past. Why would it? A study unnecessarily laden
with such racial biases, paired with shaky scientific
foundations, furthers the notion that this academic research is
less about finding the truth than about bolstering some woke
narrative.

A few days after the release of the slavery-predicts-gun-
ownership study, the American Psychological Association (APA)
released another study contending that whites support gun rights
because they are racist, and when whites oppose gun rights,
that�s also racist.

Flawed Determination of Racism
In setting up its key findings about �racist� white Americans,
the APA study uses what�s known as an Implicit Association Test
(IAT) to identify whether study participants harbored racial
resentment. IATs attempt to measure biases that exist below the
surface through the matching of terms, phrases, or pictures. In
this case, for example, the study had participants pair gun
rights terms (e.g. �hunting�) or gun-control phrases (e.g. �gun
free zone�) with white faces and black faces. Also, the study
had participants measure their agreement with certain statements
such as �Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities
overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black people should
do the same without any special favors.� Apparently, how a
participant matched faces, or agreed with a particular statement
(on a scale of 1 to 5), allowed the study authors to determine
whether a participant was racist.

While IATs once represented an intriguing method of uncovering
unvoiced racism, the technique has come under increased
criticism in recent years. In particular, it is largely accepted
that a single IAT is not sufficient to uncover racial bias, even
by those who created the test. Manhattan Institute Fellow
Heather MacDonald has extensively catalogued the serious
academic criticisms of IATs.

There are many valid policy and legal arguments opposing all
sorts of gun-control proposals. But academics are attempting to
short circuit the debate by simply labeling opponents as
�racist� and gun owners as harboring �white fear.� Discrediting
opponents with ad hominem attacks like �racist� is offensive and
wrongheaded on its own. But employing �science� based on
discredited theories or faulty assumptions is a dastardly
attempt to foment racial divisions.

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