The day before the New Zealand shooting, the Scientific American blog posted an article on gun ownership that clearly was directed at the type of people that Scientific American thinks reads Scientific American.
Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?
Research suggests it’s largely because they’re anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market and beset by racial fears
See, all that gun buying going on is just because poor, racist, white men are scared of everything darker than toasted Wonderbread.
This is noting new. This was the crux of the animated segment from Bowing For Columbine.
It’s a way for those on the Left who hate guns to look down their nose at those who like guns.
Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearms manufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before—that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.
So what? Less than 1% of the country own all the nation’s Mega Yachts.
This is nothing more than setting up the argument “we can take all the guns because really, it’s not 400 million gun owners, it’s 20 million people who own most of the guns.”
When it comes to the small percent of people who are in America’s gun culture, the Left has no respect for minority rights.
So, who is buying all these guns—and why?
It’s doesn’t matter, fuck you.
The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do.
And? I’m all for more female shooter, I really am, but shooting is a male hobby. I could say the same thing about chainsaws or mud tires, or the inverse about purses and knitting needles. That something is not perfectly gender equal doesn’t mean it is inherently bad.
But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy.
The dreaded white male, nemesis of Progressives everywhere.
According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.
Stockpiles is such a loaded word. Collects? How many golf clubs does a man need? How about ratchets? What other tool or piece of sporting equipment gets “stockpiled.”
These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears.
The trifecta of poor, racist, and obsolete.
They tend to be less educated.
Fewer degrees in Feminist Poetry Studies from Coastal colleges.
For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.
This is one thing we can agree on. The attack on the classical virtues of man as toxic masculinity and the feminist “liberation of women” resulting in one third of children being raised by a single mother has done real damage to the working class American man.
When Northland College sociologist Angela Stroud studied applications for licenses to carry concealed firearms in Texas, which exploded after President Obama was elected, she found applicants were overwhelmingly dominated by white men. In interviews, they told her that they wanted to protect themselves and the people they love.
Damned toxic male chauvinists. Don’t they know real men cry in the closet on hold with a 911 operator.
“When men became fathers or got married, they started to feel very vulnerable, like they couldn’t protect families,” she says. “For them, owning a weapon is part of what it means to be a good husband and a good father.” That meaning is “rooted in fear and vulnerability—very motivating emotions.”
Or duty and responsibility? There is no classical virtue that these people can’t twist into a vice.
The insight Stroud gained from her interviews is backed up by many, many studies. A 2013 paper by a team of United Kingdom researchers found that a one-point jump in the scale they used to measure racism increased the odds of owning a gun by 50 percent.
And pray tell exactly what quantitative scale did they use to measure racism? And what kind of racism? This is the UK we are talking about, so I’d wonder how the UK Labour party did on the racism test?
We are all familiar with Leftist bigotry, but why do I get the feeling that is not considered. Have low expectations of minorities, that’s not racist. Think the Zionists own Congress and are Nazis oppressing the poor Palestinians, that’s not racist. Think there are too many Asian kids in top schools, that’s not racist. Believe that any white male accused of something bad should be punished without evidence, that’s not racist. Buy a gun because Obama gets elected, now you are a Klansman.
A 2016 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that racial resentment among whites fueled opposition to gun control. This drives political affiliations: A 2017 study in the Social Studies Quarterly found that gun owners had become 50 percent more likely to vote Republican since 1972—and that gun culture had become strongly associated with explicit racism.
I believe the gun owners going Republican thing since the Democrats hate the Second Amendment, but explicit racism in gun culture?
That’s an insight echoed by another study published last year. Baylor University sociologists Paul Froese and F. Carson Mencken created a “gun empowerment scale” designed to measure how a nationally representative sample of almost 600 owners felt about their weapons. Their study found that people at the highest level of their scale—the ones who felt most emotionally and morally attached to their guns—were 78 percent white and 65 percent male.
More “if white men like it, it must be bad.”
Owning a gun is part of the culture of self reliance. Self reliance is more associated with Conservatism and dislike for goverment intervention into people’s personal lives. Self reliance gains greater and greater importance the further out from a urban center one gets. Rural communities are more white, but also have a greater sense of self reliance.
I could do this exact blog about hammers.
Seriously.
I knew people in NYC and Chicago who didn’t own a hammer. They didn’t have one single Wal-Mart, made in China, $19.98 basic home owner’s tool kit.
If anything broke, they called the apartment maintenance man.
I knew one guy who didn’t own a plunger.
It should go without saying that he was a staunch Liberal.
It is all learned helplessness.
The Conservative farm boys I knew from Indiana and South Dakota had guns, and could fix their own truck on the side of the highway with what they had in the toolbox in the bed.
It is a very different world.
Both Froese and Stroud found pervasive anti-government sentiments among their study participants. “This is interesting because these men tend to see themselves as devoted patriots, but make a distinction between the federal government and the ‘nation,’ says Froese. “On that point, I expect that many in this group see the ‘nation’ as being white.”
So it has to be racism and not a belief that the goverment is often a cluster-fuck of incompetence?
Investing guns with this kind of moral and emotional meaning has many consequences, the researchers say. “Put simply, owners who are more attached to their guns are most likely to believe that guns are a solution to our social ills,” says Froese. “For them, more ‘good’ people with guns would drastically reduce violence and increase civility. Again, it reflects a hero narrative, which many white men long to feel a part of.”
Guns are symbolic of a culture of self reliance, as described above.
As for civility, did we not watch live on TV Antifa’s antics or the people hounding Conservatives in restaurants or the LA riots or the Battle for Seattle, or the Ferguson riots, or Baltimore?
The mayor of an American city says protesters need room to express themselves. They do a billion dollars in damage. Homes go up in smoke. Small businesses destroyed and looted. But men looking at this and saying “I should really have a gun” are stupid and racist.
This feels utterly detached from reality.
Unfortunately, the people most likely to be killed by the guns of white men aren’t the “bad guys,” presumably criminals or terrorists. It’s themselves—and their families.
White men aren’t just the Americans most likely to own guns; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they’re also the people most likely to put them in their own mouths and pull the trigger, especially when they’re in some kind of economic distress. A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight. Most murders and shoot-outs don’t happen between strangers. They unfold within social networks, among people of the same race.
This is a tragedy. It’s also noted that his is happening mostly in the areas of the country that the Obama recovery didn’t touch.
Maybe so much of the anger and resentment, dislike of goverment, and feelings of powerlessness come from the fact that the help the government gives doesn’t land anywhere near them.
What are the solutions? That and many other studies suggest that restricting the flow of guns and ammunition would certainly save lives. But no law can address the absence of meaning and purpose that many white men appear to feel, which they might be able to gain through social connection to people who never expected to have the economic security and social power that white men once enjoyed.
“Ridicule of working-class white people is not helpful,” says Angela Stroud. “We need to push the ‘good guys’ to have a deeper connection to other people. We need to reimagine who we are in relation to each other.”
Which is why you mock them, criticize them, and call them stupid, racist, and devalue their culture and values.
That is so very helpful.
So Scientific American’s opinion is that the people who buy the most guns are also the same demographic of people who are suffering the most from the opined epidemic, and for exactly the same reasons, they are poor, uneducated, angry, racist, obsolete, dirt people.
Rather than explain gun culture, it says it is a product of bigotry and misery.
The solution they come up with is gun bans talk therapy, and the way they describe these people is with the exact kind of language that makes them an untouchable class for Progressives.
Rather than try to deal with the underlying cause of gun suicide, it discourages it.
This is the ultimate othering of gun owners and people in gun culture and reaffirms to the people who don’t own guns that they are just better people than those who do.
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