The more racist a white person is, the more likely he or she is to own a gun, a new international study released on Thursday has found.
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The report, done by researchers at Australia’s Monash University and Britain’s Manchester University, was conducted to better understand gun culture in the United States, the Daily News reports. And apparently, to the researchers, the results weren’t surprising.
“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 University researcher Kerry O’Brien said in an email to the news site.
According to the study, political leanings and geography also play a part in gun ownership. Specifically, 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,” The Guardian quoted from the study.
Ranking racism is tricky, so the determination was based on how subjects answered a set of questions — some based on stereotypes such as blacks being “violent” — to see if the subject endorsed the stereotype or not.
Read more at the Daily News.
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