You Own Guns? That's Racist!

This one's going around...

If You Own Guns You’re A Racist!

Racism and guns go together.

That’s the finding of an international study released Thursday that says the two are linked. More specifically, odds are greater that a racist white American also keeps a gun at home and opposes gun control regulations.

The conclusion wasn’t too surprising for researchers at Australia’s Monash University and Britain’s Manchester University, which sought to better understand American gun culture.

“There had already been research showing that … blacks are more likely to be shot, so we thought there must be something happening between the concept of being black and some whites wanting guns,” Monash researcher Kerry O’Brien said in an email to the Daily News.

Of course, the problem in America is not white on black gun crime, it's primarily black on black gun crime, with a little spill over of black on white gun crime.  But this is just their "motivation" which is completely founded on faulty assumption.  How about the study itself?

He also found that political leanings and geography play a part into firearm ownership.

“It is particularly noteworthy that the relationship between symbolic racism and the gun-related outcomes was maintained in the presence of conservative ideologies, political affiliation, opposition to government control and being from a southern state, which are otherwise strong predictors of gun ownership and opposition to gun reform,” said the study, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE .

I'm shocked, shocked to find that white people from more rural areas tend to be more likely to be conservative, gun owners, and opposed to government policies, particularly gun confiscation "reform."  I was curious how they determine that such people were, on average, more apt to be racist than urban liberals.  I went to the original article, (a nice thing about an open, on line journal) which I found spent a lot of time mentioning "symbolic racism," which I had no clue about, not being a sociologist.  Just how is "symbolic racism" measured?

In wave 20 of the ANES, participants were asked to respond to a four-item scale drawn from the Symbolic Racism Scale. Specifically, participants indicated the extent to which they agree (1 = agree strongly to 5 = disagree strongly) with statements such as “Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class” (reverse scored). Scores on the four items were coded so that high scores are indicative of elevated levels of symbolic racism...

So, failure to agree with standard liberal bromides is scored as racist.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is commonly used in experimental psychology to gauge implicit bias. A brief race (anti-black) IAT was included in wave 19 of the ANES to assess the extent to which participants demonstrated black-white racial bias. The theoretical background, instructions, and methodology for the race IAT have been well described elsewhere [21], [22]. Briefly, the race IAT was administered online, requiring participants to rapidly associate pictures of white and black faces with positively- and negatively-valenced words. Participants were asked to press the key “P” for white faces and for positive words and “Q” for any other stimulus. Alternatively, they were asked to press “P” for black faces or positive words and “Q” for other stimuli. The test consisted of 84 stimuli, two practice runs (14 sets of stimuli each) and two data collection blocks (28 sets of stimuli each). Response latencies across blocks were analysed to produce an effect size coefficient or D score. This score is coded so that positive scores indicate an unconscious preference for whites over blacks.

 He who hesitates may not be lost, but he is certainly racist...

It is not too strong to call this junk science.