The simple, surprising factor that explains America’s gun problem

[yallerdawg]

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Research links racism and gun ownership

Source: Fusion, by Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel

Racially resentful white people love guns
The first step in our analysis was to understand the individual characteristics and political alliances and beliefs that are associated with gun ownership. To do this, we examined data from the 2012 American National Election Studies survey. Using a model that controlled for race, age, gender, education, income, partisan identification, geography and ideology, we found that racial resentment is highly correlated with gun ownership.

Racially resentful white people don’t like gun control
We also found that racial resentment strongly predicts opposition to gun control, controlling for race, age, education, partisanship, ideology, geographic region, income and gender. A person who is very racially resentful is much more likely to oppose gun control measures than one who is not.

And...
In order to corroborate these results, we also examined the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a survey of more than 50,000 people conducted in the fall of the election year (every federal election year since 2010) that uses some of the same questions as the American National Election Studies to measure respondents’ levels of racial resentment. We looked at how strongly people with varying levels of resentment toward black people supported (or didn’t support) five major gun-related policies:

Racially resentful white people are highly passionate about guns
In addition to racial attitudes, gun control efforts are hampered by a concept political scientists call “issue salience”: the fact that the issue of gun control is much more important to some people than others. In particular, our research shows that those who oppose gun control are more mobilized and care more about the issue than those who oppose it.

Much more at: http://fusion.net/story/324449/racial-resentment-guns-research/