White Males, Stockpiles of Weapons, and Racial Power

“The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male –

but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies,

the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.”

– Jeremy Adam Smith, sociologist and editor of Greater Good magazine

Guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.

Who is largely responsible for the surge in gun acquisition?

White males – particularly those less educated who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious – and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns.

Why?

Stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. A 2016 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that racial resentment among whites fueled opposition to gun control. They are struggling to “once again be the heroes.”

“The gun is a ubiquitous symbol of power and independence, two things white males are worried about. Guns, therefore, provide a way to regain their masculinity, which they perceive has been eroded by increasing economic impotency … put simply, owners who are more attached to their guns are most likely to believe that guns are a solution to our social ills. For them, more ‘good’ people with guns would drastically reduce violence and increase civility. Again, it reflects a hero narrative, which many white men long to feel a part of.”

– Paul Froese, Baylor University sociologist

For many conservative men, the gun feels like a force for order in a chaotic world, suggests a study published 2018. Steven Shepherd and Aaron Kay, found “in situations that are inherently chaotic and disorderly (i.e., shootings), liberals see the introduction of another firearm (i.e., an armed citizen) as introducing more disorder into the situation, whereas conservatives see armed citizens as providing more order to the situation.”

(Steven Shepherd and Aaron C. Kay, "Guns as a Source of Order and Chaos: Compensatory Control and the Psychological (Dis)Utility of Guns for Liberals and Conservatives," Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 3, no. 1. January 2018)

Sociologist Angela Stroud studied applications for licenses to carry concealed firearms in Texas, which exploded after President Obama was elected. She says …

“When men became fathers or got married, they started to feel very vulnerable, like they couldn’t protect families. For them, owning a weapon is part of what it means to be a good husband and a good father.” That meaning is “rooted in fear and vulnerability – very motivating emotions.”

But Stroud another prime motivation: racial anxiety. About this manly “anxiety,” Stroud explains …

“A lot of people talked about how important Obama was to get a concealed-carry license: ‘He’s for free health care, he’s for welfare.’ They were asking, ‘Whatever happened to hard work?’”

These white men feared Obama’s presidency would empower minorities to threaten their property and families. The insight Stroud gained from her interviews is backed up by many studies.

A 2013 paper by a team of United Kingdom researchers found that a one-point jump in the scale they used to measure racism increased the odds of owning a gun by 50 percent. A 2016 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that racial resentment among whites fueled opposition to gun control.

“The reason guns cannot be regulated in the USA is because of the violence, not in spite of it. The violence is necessary to maintain the fear, and the fear is necessary to maintain white male privilege. The idea that white men can and do shoot people causes every interaction with a white man to carry a tinge of threat: If you disrespect him, or merely fail to please him enough, he just might explode.”

– James Fallows (2018), staff writer at The Atlantic

That insight was echoed by another study published last year. Baylor University sociologists Paul Froese and F. Carson Mencken created a “gun empowerment scale” designed to measure how a nationally representative sample of almost 600 owners felt about their weapons. Their study found that people at the highest level of their scale – the ones who felt most emotionally and morally attached to their guns – were 78 percent white and 65 percent male.

This gun empowerment also drives political affiliations: A 2017 study in the Social Studies Quarterly found that gun owners had become 50 percent more likely to vote Republican since 1972—and that gun culture had become strongly associated with explicit racism.

Nathan Wuertenberg, author of Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism and founder of the online journal The Activist History Review, reports that white men make up the largest percentage of gun owners (and are ahead of people of color and women by double digits). In the NRA, the breakdown is even more stark, with white men accounting for twice the proportion they do in the general population.

What are some deadly effects of a heavily armed modern populace?

Rates of gun injury and death, including dramatic rises in gun suicides are spiking.

According to Jonathan M. Metzl – who directs the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University – reports white men comprise about 31 percent of the U.S. population but 74 percent of firearm suicide victims. Recently released CDC data found that the overwhelming majority of Americans who ended their lives with guns in 2017 “were white (91 percent) and male (87 percent).”

A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight. Most murders and shoot-outs don’t happen between strangers. They unfold within social networks, among people of the same race.

A gun in the home is far more likely to kill or wound the people who live there than is a burglar or serial killer. Most of the time, studies show the dead and wounded know the people who shot them.

A gun in the home makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed by her husband. Everytown for Gun Safety Support reports …

“Every month, an average of 52 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner. Nearly 1 million women alive today have reported being shot or shot at by intimate partners, and 4.5 million women have reported being threatened with a gun. In more than half of mass shootings over the past decade, the perpetrator shot a current or former intimate partner or family member as part of the rampage.”

Every week in America, 136 children and teenagers are shot – and more often than not, it’s a sibling, friend, parent, or relative who holds the gun. For every homicide deemed justified by the police, guns are used in 78 suicides. A study in JAMA Internal Medicine (2018) shows restrictive gun laws don’t prevent white men from defending themselves and their families. Instead, those laws stop them from shooting themselves and each other.

Whatever the view of the appropriate scope of the Second Amendment, it should extend to all equally, without regard to race; however, the government has rejected research into potential agents of violence, how people acquire weapons, and whom they may target. For more than two decades, the CDC has been barred from researching the effects of gun violence. This has only served to make citizens less safe.

White male insecurity has prompted the belief that if other kinds of people achieve a measure of political power, there’ll be less (or none) for the men who always had it. These men want a feeling of impregnability they feel they were promised and believed their kind once had. They see their power waning and it terrifies them, so they lash out. They attack and blame a scapegoat with unequaled American derision – blacks.

If you doubt the target and reject the racism involved, let's turn that reality 180 degrees. Imagine this fantasy scenario:

Right now in the U.S. black males, the majority population, are stockpiling guns as they prepare to regain their own racial masculinity. They see these weapons as a solution to their social ills. After centuries of oppression, black males – many of whom with genuine feelings of aggression – find it necessary to arm themselves “to the teeth.” They are joining the NRA in record numbers as their need for control and finding their place in this chaotic world drive their lust for weapons.

In that America, I see white Americans in outrage. White males would be calling for arrests and gun control. These same white men would likely abandon the NRA and protest its unfair policies and politics. Cries of redress for black racial domination would surely fill the land.

The same social, economic, and political pressures that created the slave culture also created the gun culture. In fact, the nation was founded on violent action. The founding fathers gave people the right to own guns so militias could handle defense in lieu of a standing army. Our frontier expansion required guns to protect settlers and eliminate native resistors. And so the necessary militia stance became part of the national consciousness.

James Fallows speaks of “a national persona that developed lauding the rugged individual, who takes matters in his/her own hands … The idea that white men can and do shoot people causes every interaction with a white man to carry a tinge of threat: If you disrespect him, or merely fail to please him enough, he just might explode.”

Conservative whites have taken over one of the two major parties in this country and made it subservient to their retrograde whims. Ryu Spaeth, features editor of The New Republic explains …

“Guns, for them, are not about hunting or self-defense or the frontier spirit or any of the other fig leaves that are brandished every time their true agenda starts to show. It is about asserting the primacy of a group identity, protecting it from threats both real (inexorable demographic change) and imagined (invasions of Hispanic rapists and murders).”

This protective and heroic? view is entwined in the history of America. Read this letter of December 27, 1860, from Stephen F. Hale, Alabama's commissioner to Kentucky. Institutions, group identity, and a hero narrative exist in this nineteenth century parallel to modern times. I close with this look back into history …

To His Excellency B. McGoffin, Governor of the Commonwealth of Kentucky:

“Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions – nothing less than an open declaration of war – for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans. Especially is this true in the cotton-growing States, where, in many localities, the slave outnumbers the white population ten to one.”