Public discourse about gun death instead focuses on violence toward others and homicides and relies more on racial and media stereotypes and anxieties about black criminals than on-the-ground realities. A widely cited opinion study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that “attitudes towards guns in many US whites appear to be influenced… by illogical racial biases” related to the “fear of black violence and crime.” Meanwhile, as the Pew report put it, the dramatic drop in gun homicide rates was not just invisible—most Americans believed the opposite to be true: Despite national attention
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