Guns and Prejudice

Many types of gun owner exist, and many are reasonable people. I was brought up around guns, so I’ve met many kinds of owners. The ones who seem to be most vocal in this country, though, are those who say they need their guns for protection. Rarely do they say what they feel they need protection from, but the answer must, in part, be examined. People fear those who they think will take something away from them or hurt them or their loved ones. Sometimes that is defined as The Government; sometimes it’s defined as “bad people”. It’s this idea of bad people that we may want to look at.

This country incarcerates its citizens at a rate unrivaled in the rest of the world. Today, one in three black men can expect to do jail or prison time. Things aren’t much better for Latinos. These are therefore the “bad people” to many of us. This racial bias is widely acknowledged and deplored. Doesn’t it follow, therefore, that those gun owners who feel they need protection against lawless elements are, in fact, falling into some sort of racist confusion? If non-white people are more likely to be criminals, then the people against whom gun owners are arming themselves must be imagined as non-white at least as often as they are imagined as being white.

And so a stereotype emerges.

This sort of creeping racism is common enough. People don’t realize they’re doing it a lot of the time. We stereotype, we pre-judge, we jump to conclusions often enough. But this mental jump is hardly to our credit. I’d like to see what the NRA has to say about racist attitudes in its membership. Do they even dare to look? And if not, why not? Fear-mongering will certainly sell more guns – so to what extent do the gun manufacturers and the NRA work to create more fear? And to what extent does that play on racial prejudices? If barely-concealed racism is being used as marketing tool, what can we expect in the future?