USA – -(Ammoland.com)- “Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?” Scientific American asks in a March 14 headline. “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.”
As a source of authority, the article points to a “recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.” The thing is, that study mentions neither jobs nor racial fears. What it does mention are:
“1) For protection against strangers; 2) For protection against people I know; 3) For protection against animals; 4) For hunting; 5) For other sporting use; 6) For a collection; 7) For some other reason.”
So what are we left with, aside from the tantalizing lead about increases in the number of guns manufactured since Obama became president? White men are the predominant demographic buying multiple guns. And concealed carry permits are on the rise.
It’s the old bitter clingers are racists smear, as if the only reason to oppose Obama was because of his race – as opposed to honestly disagreeing with his politics.
Why would whites have more guns? It couldn’t be because there are more whites?
Why would men have more guns than women? It couldn’t be because that’s traditionally the way things were – but that it’s changing as more women come to understand that choice is theirs?
Why would gun owners have multiple guns? It couldn’t be because as they learn about them and find they like them, they come to understand that different firearms have different utility? And because once you become an enthusiast you appreciate having multiple firearms for reasons of your own?
Why are there more concealed carry permits, and why do more white people have them? It couldn’t be (again) because there are more white people, that the practice has grown considerably as it has become more normalized in so-called “red states,” and that more of them tend to live in “shall issue” areas where it is not culturally and legally discouraged?
Assessments of racist and other dysfunctional male motivations are coming from “Northland College sociologist Angela Stroud [with her own agenda on guns, not to mention on “gender” and social justice” issues] who “studied applications for licenses to carry concealed firearms in Texas.” That’s evidently what inspired her to coin the forehead-slapping phrase “Hegemonic Masculinity and Concealed Handguns.”
I don’t suppose the disconnect with (and apparent resentment against) traditional men might be within her?
Also adding to the body of “progressive” illusions was a “paper by a team of United Kingdom researchers [that] found that a one-point jump in the scale they used to measure racism increased the odds of owning a gun by 50 percent.” Completing the trifecta was “a 2016 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago [that] found … racial resentment among whites fueled opposition to gun control.”
Plus the implication just had to be worked in that such racists vote Republican.
In another “study,” liberals and conservatives were asked to imagine holding a handgun. To no one’s surprise, “conservatives felt less risk,” while evidently, just the thought of it gave the Pajama Boys a case of the vapors.
Good grief.
Meanwhile, another team of anti-gun sociologists pegged gun owners as insecure, anti-government, and essentially fetishists “investing guns with … moral and emotional meaning.”
How very anthropomorphic and primitive, assigning human qualities to inanimate objects. Not by us, by them.
Speaking non-scientifically, in my experience gun owners view them as tools (albeit many have an appropriate appreciation of fine craftsmanship, performance, technical excellence, aesthetics and design elegance). Every gun I’ve ever owned has been utterly devoid of self-animation and motivation.
That’s not to say any tool can’t be put to good or evil use. No duh, that’s why some of us don’t want to be at the mercy of the merciless. And as for utility for preserving life and property on both an individual and a societal scale, anyone who maintains that’s not self-evident is either too stupid to know where to look or else they know perfectly well but don’t want you to.
So naturally they trot out suicide, but leave unmentioned the much higher rate in “gun-free” Japan. And they trot out the old deception that “a gun in the home is far more likely to kill or wound the people who live there than is a burglar or serial killer.”
Yeah, and that’s because gun owners aren’t the bloodthirsty knuckledraggers looking for any excuse to shoot people over — despite the smears. DGUs can and do happen, most of the time without a shot ever being fired. The mere presentation of a firearm is enough to discourage aggression and stop violence before it starts, which you’d think would be viewed as a good thing. That’s what they’re intentionally ignoring – along with the obscured fact that the “homes” they get their death stats from may be criminal homes. They’ve been pulling this scam for years, and dusting it off for each new generation that missed seeing it debunked the first and subsequent times and think they’ve just learned a new “Gotcha!”
We could go on with the fisking but the point is made so why bother? The article is garbage and unworthy of a publication that includes the word “Scientific” (or “American”) in its title. Then again, it’s hardly a new tack for what has devolved into a pretentious, pseudoscientific rag. These are the same agenda purveyors who say the only way to stave off catastrophic “climate change” is for “world government” to empower “a new set of institutions … imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers.”
You know, what we free Americans with guns call “targets.” That probably goes a long way to explaining why they need to disparage us and why they desperately want to see us disarmed.
About David Codrea:
David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.
In addition to being a field editor/columnist at GUNS Magazine and associate editor for Oath Keepers, he blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.