Historical rates of enslavement predict modern rates of American gun ownership

[DBoon]

https://phys.org/news/2022-08-historical-enslavement-modern-american-gun.html

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.