Anti-Black racism linked to lower support for some gun rights
Racial resentment leads some to associate gun rights with white people, study finds
Peer-Reviewed PublicationRacially resentful white Americans are less likely to support some gun rights if they believe Black people are exercising those rights more than white people, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
White Americans who expressed high levels of anti-Black sentiments associated gun rights with white people and gun control with Black people, the study found. Those research participants were quicker to match photos of white people to gun rights phrases (e.g., self-protection, National Rifle Association) and photos of Black people to gun control phrases (e.g., waiting period, weapons ban).
While Republicans were more likely to make racially biased assumptions about gun rights than white Democrats, anti-Black views had a greater impact on the findings than party affiliation, the study found. The research was published online in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
The study examined only racial resentment toward Black people, expressed as the belief that racial inequities are due to Black Americans not working hard enough to succeed and unfairly receiving entitlements to promote racial equity.
Guns are both symbolically and practically tied to power in the U.S., said lead researcher Gerald Higginbotham, PhD, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia. “Gun rights are just one of the many rights we have in the United States, like voting, that a large number of white Americans have both knowingly and unknowingly racialized as being for white citizens, and especially not for Black citizens,” he said.
As more people take notice that Black Americans are legal gun owners, too, race and racism may play an increasingly explicit role in debates over gun rights and gun control reforms, Higginbotham said.
Since January 2019, 7.5 million people, or almost 3% of the U.S. adult population, bought guns for the first time, according to a recent study. Black people, who accounted for 20% of the first-time purchases, make up about 12% of the U.S. population.
The current research was made up of three online studies with more than 850 white participants, including one nationally representative sample. In two of the three studies, the participants were equally divided into two groups, with one group reading a real Fox News article accurately reporting that Black Americans were obtaining concealed-carry gun permits at a greater rate than white Americans. The second group read an identical article except the races were reversed, with white Americans obtaining permits faster.
Racially resentful participants – as measured by responses to four questions – expressed less support for concealed-carry permits when they perceived Black Americans as obtaining them at a greater rate. However, their support for gun rights unrelated to concealed-carry was not impacted. This provides some evidence that racial bias accounted for the lessened support for concealed-carry permits because it was the specific gun right Black people were described as exercising more than white people.
Higginbotham said the findings mirror the racist motives behind historical efforts to limit gun rights for Black people, dating from before slavery to the Jim Crow era and onward to the Mulford Act, a California law approved in 1967. The National Rifle Association, which today opposes most gun control reforms, supported the Mulford Act’s statewide ban on open carry of loaded firearms. The act was spurred by opposition to Black Panther Party members who carried loaded guns in a protest at the California state capitol, and in their neighborhoods, meant to protect residents from police brutality.
The researchers emphasized that their findings don’t support the use of anti-Black racism as a means of building support for gun control reforms. “An attempt to politically weaponize racist beliefs expressed toward Black lawful gun owners would be shortsighted and could dangerously infringe upon the rights of Black people instead of focusing on saving lives from gun violence,” Higginbotham said.
The research did not examine potential intersections between racism and other gun rights or gun control measures, such as bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Article: “When an Irresistible Prejudice Meets Immovable Politics: Black Legal Gun Ownership Undermines Racially Resentful White Americans Gun Rights Advocacy,” Gerald Higginbotham, PhD, University of Virginia, and David Sears, PhD, and Lauren Goldstein, PhD, University of California Los Angeles. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, published online Aug. 25, 2022.
Contact: Gerald Higginbotham, PhD, may be contacted via public.affairs@apa.org.
JOURNAL
Journal of Experimental Psychology
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
When an Irresistible Prejudice Meets Immovable Politics: Black Legal Gun Ownership Undermines Racially Resentful White Americans Gun Rights Advocacy
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
25-Aug-2022
Historical rates of enslavement predict modern rates of American gun ownership
Peer-Reviewed PublicationThe higher percentage of enslaved people that a U.S. county counted among its residents in 1860, the more guns its residents have in the present, according to a new analysis by researchers exploring why Americans’ feelings about guns differ so much from people around the globe.
More than 45% of the world’s civilian-owned firearms are in the United States, where just 5 percent of the world’s people live. This disparity may have something to do with the way the majority of American gun owners view gun ownership.
“Gun culture is one case where American Exceptionalism really is true,” says Nick Buttrick, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor of psychology. “We are really radically different even from countries like Canada or Australia, places that have similar cultural roots.”
Pew Research Center surveys show two-thirds of Americans who own guns say it’s a way to keep themselves safe, while in other countries, people are more likely believe the presence of a gun adds risk and danger to their lives, considering, for example, the far higher rates of homicide and suicide in households with guns. Gun culture scholars have also explored the role of race in American gun attitudes for some time, Buttrick says, and the two may be linked.
In a study published recently in the journal PNAS Nexus, Buttrick and co-author Jessica Mazen, a psychology graduate student at the University of Virginia, describe a shift in sentiment away from the predominant, pre-Civil War idea of guns as tools for hunting and sport. In the post-Civil War South, the belief that a gun was necessary to protect family, property and a way of life grew prominent among white southerners. This was driven by a flood of surplus military weapons, the rise of armed, white-supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, and elite rhetoric that Reconstruction governments would not protect the interests of white southerners from newly freed and politically-empowered Black people.
The researchers compared county-level population data from the 1860 census to gun ownership patterns in the present. Because there is no national record of gun ownership, the study uses a widely accepted proxy — the proportion of suicides in a county that involved a firearm, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mortality records from 1999 to 2016.
“What we see is a strong correlation between the number of slaves in a county in 1860 and the number of guns there now, even after we control for variables like personal politics, crime rates, and education and income,” says Buttrick, who produced the study while working as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, before joining the UW–Madison faculty this year.
This correlation was strong even when the researchers focused only on white gun owners, narrowing their proxy for gun ownership to firearm suicides involving only non-Hispanic white victims.
The study further pinpoints a particularly Southern root for the American belief that guns keep people safe.
“The extent to which people feel unsafe only predicts gun ownership in counties in the South, where the more unsafe people feel, the more likely they are to own a gun,” Buttrick says. “If you look in areas that didn't have any slaves in the 1860s, whether people feel unsafe there today does not predict today’s county-level gun ownership.”
Additionally, areas in the North and West with more guns in the present day are home to people that are more likely to have Facebook friends that live in parts of the South that had higher historical rates of slavery. In these areas, as in the South, feeling unsafe is more likely to predict increased gun ownership. The researchers say this suggests that social transmission of beliefs about guns is at work.
“The question is, how do these ideas about guns get to the rest of the country?” Buttrick says. “As people move, they bring with them the culture that formed them. We can see the remnants of those moves and the lingering connections to family and community in people’s social media connections, and it lines up with the slavery-gun-ownership pattern.”
The results may give researchers a clearer sense of how gun culture has developed and evolved differently across the country – why some parts of the country still retain a hunting culture, while others are dominated by a gun culture based around personal protection.
“It helps to elucidate some things — why is it that race and guns are so tightly tied together? Why is it that guns are so present in the public mind and discussion for white people and not for Black people?” Buttrick says. “And it does help make sense of why protective gun ownership is such a popular idea in the United States, but not elsewhere.”
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— Chris Barncard, barncard@wisc.edu
JOURNAL
PNAS Nexus
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Data/statistical analysis
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
People
ARTICLE TITLE
Historical prevalence of slavery predicts contemporary American gun ownership
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
5-Aug-2022
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