Why white men are stockpiling guns

Roxxsmom

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I thought of posting this in the latest mass shooting thread, but this is article shifts the focus enough I thought it might warrant its own thread. I think it gets at something that most of us feel at some level, but that has been hard to state without evidence for fear of engendering defensiveness. I know I prompted at least one flounce from these boards by suggesting it some time ago.

Why, guns have always been a part of our culture in the US, are we having more of these shootings lately, and why are more people stockpiling guns. And why are most of the people doing this white males with conservative views? This article tackles these questions.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-are-white-men-stockpiling-guns/

As it turns out, racism does play a role, as does the role of guns as security blankets, and the election of Obama did precipitate at least some of this.

A tragic side effect of white males owning the majority of the nation's guns is that they are the ones most likely to commit suicide with guns.

The author of the article posits that a potential solution to the problem would be to increase connection between people, to get these white, gun-owning guys to feel like they have things in common with others. The question is, how do we do this?
 
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darkprincealain

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I don't have any answers, but as a white, cisgender gay dude who doesn't believe in guns, I bought mace not too long after the presidential election. I remember being mocked in this subforum for feeling like it would be a good idea for increasing connections even within AW.

So, color me extremely interested in where this thread goes.
 

Jason

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I will watch with interest as well...
 

Roxxsmom

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I suspect the current rash of mass shootings can't be traced to any one social element, but it's hard for me to believe the proliferation of (and increased ease in obtaining) highly destructive, military style weapons doesn't play a role. You can kill people with shotguns, pistols, and traditional hunting rifles too, but the features of so-called "assault" rifles makes it easier. It's also possible that they are so "fun" to use that they make the idea of going out in a blaze of murderous glory more appealing to some. And the damage done by these guns to human tissues is truly devastating.

The thing that really makes me sick, though, is the shift in conservative, pro-gun politics over the past three decades or so, to the point where any national-level regulation or legislative control of these weapons and the features allowed is off the table. State-level and city-level controls, of course, are of limited use when people can easily bring in guns that are legal in other states or communities.

The NRA has shifted too, and is currently in the pockets of the gun industry, not about promoting safe and responsible gun practices by sportsmen (it did not even always oppose all gun restrictions). Sales of these weapons increase with after mass shootings. Talk about a conflict of interest.

Somehow, we've morphed into a society where the second Amendment seems to be the only part of the Bill of Rights that exists without exception. There are limits on the rights of assembly, property, religion, and even speech (generally made as concessions to public safety and the right of others to go about their business unimpeded), but somehow the right to bear arms can't be qualified in any way.
 
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Fingers

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Every election cycle since I can remember has included wild rumors of gun confiscations if such and such candidate wins. Its usually more fervent when a dem wins, hence the buying spree when Obama got elected. So far the gun confiscations haven't happened, but that doesn't seem to stop the people on the right from saying it about every four years. Im a non aligned gun owner. I am also a veteran. I am all for changing gun laws to include banning of some semi auto firearms and who can buy firearms. My sister in law is moving back to Portland next week and when she does she is bringing with her a saw I can use to cut my AK-47 into unusable pieces of metal. I can no longer justify my owning it. I don't do much target shooting anymore and I don't hunt. The few people ive told about my plan have gotten pretty upset, but I have to do this for me.
 

Roxxsmom

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What I find interesting is the level of anxiety over the effects of increasing the social safety net when Obama won. The article claims that they felt Obama's more liberal policies would lead to more crime, so they needed to defend their families more.

It's not like Obama's positions were different from the norm for Democrats. Actually, he was pretty moderate on that front as liberals go. Were white men stockpiling guns in the same way after Bill Clinton won? Not that I've heard, though there was the usual indignant sputtering from conservative quarters about the undeserving poor getting a free ride, and liberals being soft on crime. I am guessing that the increase in weapon stockpliling by white males after Nov 2008 had more to to with Obama's race and the consequent upswing in pride and activism by PoC than it did his proposed policies about welfare.

It also doesn't explain why someone who is concerned about crime feels the need to stockpile multiple military-grade weapons, when a shotgun, handgun, or hunting rifle probably serves just as well in home defense. Of course these things aren't logical, and guns are security blankets, but I think there's something else going on here. I suspect advertising, the proliferation of gun shows, and the internet (which makes it easy for people to communicate about how badass and "fun" these weapons are) is playing a role too. And now, the identification of gun ownership as a statement of given sociopolitical outlook is probably fanning the flames.
 
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cornflake

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I thought of posting this in the latest mass shooting thread, but this is article shifts the focus enough I thought it might warrant its own thread. I think it gets at something that most of us feel at some level, but that has been hard to state without evidence for fear of engendering defensiveness. I know I prompted at least one flounce from these boards by suggesting it some time ago.

Why, guns have always been a part of our culture in the US, are we having more of these shootings lately, and why are more people stockpiling guns. And why are most of the people doing this white males with conservative views? This article tackles these questions.

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-are-white-men-stockpiling-guns/

As it turns out, racism does play a role, as does the role of guns as security blankets, and the election of Obama did precipitate at least some of this.

A tragic side effect of white males owning the majority of the nation's guns is that they are the ones most likely to commit suicide with guns.

The author of the article posits that a potential solution to the problem would be to increase connection between people, to get these white, gun-owning guys to feel like they have things in common with others. The question is, how do we do this?

How about we don't bother trying to soothe the illogical and just take their guns away? I have so little interest in the 'listen to the disaffected racist/climate change denier/whatever Trump supporter/whatever' thing. Where are the people asking the Trump supporting voters who think DACA recipients are killing everyone and illegal immigrants are pouring over the border taking jobs and the country is a crime-ridden cesspool and etc. to listen to educated coastal liberals to try to understand them better?

What I find interesting is the level of anxiety over the effects of increasing the social safety net when Obama won. The article claims that they felt Obama's more liberal policies would lead to more crime, so they needed to defend their families more.

It's not like Obama's positions were different from the norm for Democrats. Actually, he was pretty moderate on that front as liberals go. Were white men stockpiling guns in the same way after Bill Clinton won? Not that I've heard, though there was the usual indignant sputtering from conservative quarters about the undeserving poor getting a free ride, and liberals being soft on crime. I am guessing that the increase in weapon stockpliling by white males after Nov 2008 had more to to with Obama's race and the consequent upswing in pride and activism by PoC than it did his proposed policies about welfare.

This Vox article
about a book the writer spent years out talking to rural Americans to write kind of sums it up for me. There's no point. Outnumber and outlegislate and move the hell on.
 

Brightdreamer

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How about we don't bother trying to soothe the illogical and just take their guns away? I have so little interest in the 'listen to the disaffected racist/climate change denier/whatever Trump supporter/whatever' thing. Where are the people asking the Trump supporting voters who think DACA recipients are killing everyone and illegal immigrants are pouring over the border taking jobs and the country is a crime-ridden cesspool and etc. to listen to educated coastal liberals to try to understand them better?

A-freakin'-men to that... It gets really, really old that only one side is expected to understand and reach out and compromise, while the other smugly grows more entrenched in untenable and illogical world-views and moves even further backwards - a state that inevitably must draw the whole backwards, too, since forward momentum is perpetually checked. I guess victory will only be achieved when we finally run smack against the far back wall of human emergence, and there's nowhere left to regress without acknowledging evolution.

You cannot reason with people who refuse to even open the same book, let alone get on the same page, as you.

Ages ago, I recall reading a cartoon (Doonesbury, I think, but don't quote me on that) where a left-winger and right-winger were discussing the State Of Things, and the right-winger said that the weakness of the left was that they always had to stop to consider other options and points of view, while the right just knew they were correct and didn't have to quibble or debate, just charged ahead. In the last panel, the left-winger conceded he had a point, and the right-winger smugly won. It's a problem that just keeps tripping us up...
 

Max Vaehling

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When I was 19, I hitch-hiked across the USA with a friend. One driver who picked us up in Louisiana asked how we could make such a trip unarmed. Truth was, it hadn't even occurred to us that weapons were a thing people would take on trips even in the US (so you can tell it was waaaaay before Obama), but I thought about it for about a second to give him a more concise answer. I said eventually: If we had weapons on us, we'd most probably also carry a readiness to use them, always in the backs of our heads, thus making any situation more likely to escalate. He seemed content with the answer.

Then again, real gun nuts will probably be more likely to have that kind of urge if they don't carry their guns. Not sure why I had to think of that old story right now. Maybe because you can find middle ground with people, a surprising number of people are actually quite reasonable, including gun owners. But if they've reached that point where any proposed safety measure feels as if The English are coming to take away America, there's no logicking away from that position because it never was built on logic in the first place.
 

CWatts

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When I was 19, I hitch-hiked across the USA with a friend. One driver who picked us up in Louisiana asked how we could make such a trip unarmed. Truth was, it hadn't even occurred to us that weapons were a thing people would take on trips even in the US (so you can tell it was waaaaay before Obama), but I thought about it for about a second to give him a more concise answer. I said eventually: If we had weapons on us, we'd most probably also carry a readiness to use them, always in the backs of our heads, thus making any situation more likely to escalate. He seemed content with the answer.

This. For some reason this made me think of the murderhobo behavior seen in roleplaying games, with violence always the first resort. But that's not too far off from say the retired cop who shot a guy dead for throwing popcorn (Tampa, 2014) .
 

frimble3

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My sister in law is moving back to Portland next week and when she does she is bringing with her a saw I can use to cut my AK-47 into unusable pieces of metal. I can no longer justify my owning it. I don't do much target shooting anymore and I don't hunt.
This is such a sensible, thought out plan! Thank you for not merely selling it on to someone else who may not have your principles.
 

ap123

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As far as I can tell, getting these white, stockpiling guys to feel connected with a sense of community is what brought us this President, via the internet. They found each other and were empowered, while stoking their fears of "others." As far as they're concerned they've now been validated. I don't think there's a social program that will fix this, not for this generation, anyway.

I'm guessing the only way to get this toothpaste back into the tube is through strict legislation and social pressure that is the opposite of what the article is proposing, ie: if you value guns over life you will not be welcomed into polite society.
 

Larry M

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As far as I can tell, getting these white, stockpiling guys to feel connected with a sense of community is what brought us this President, via the internet. They found each other and were empowered, while stoking their fears of "others." As far as they're concerned they've now been validated. I don't think there's a social program that will fix this, not for this generation, anyway.

I'm guessing the only way to get this toothpaste back into the tube is through strict legislation and social pressure that is the opposite of what the article is proposing, ie: if you value guns over life you will not be welcomed into polite society.

This.
 

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It's not like Obama's positions were different from the norm for Democrats. Actually, he was pretty moderate on that front as liberals go. Were white men stockpiling guns in the same way after Bill Clinton won? Not that I've heard...

Just because you didn't hear it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. It did. I know dozens of people who are conservative republicans who buy guns every time they hear the rumors of gun confiscations. And they bought guns after Clinton was elected. I hardly think that they are a one off group. This happens across the country. The gun confiscation fear goes hand in hand with the racism. They have to have a 'reason' to keep buying more guns, and irrational fears of hordes of black men running rampant work just as well as fear of the government taking their guns. These are irrational people we are dealing with, you cant treat them as if they are going to act rationally. Especially now that they have a leader who is the exact opposite of rational.
 

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How about we don't bother trying to soothe the illogical and just take their guns away? I have so little interest in the 'listen to the disaffected racist/climate change denier/whatever Trump supporter/whatever' thing. Where are the people asking the Trump supporting voters who think DACA recipients are killing everyone and illegal immigrants are pouring over the border taking jobs and the country is a crime-ridden cesspool and etc. to listen to educated coastal liberals to try to understand them better?

I think there's a powerful industry driving much of this, as with the rest of our national politics. When there is money to be made, there are lobbies (and politicians) willing to manipulate the masses, so to speak. Guns are big business, and business drives everything. That's why we have a supreme court who has ruled (in defiance of two centuries of precedent) that the second amendment applies to the unrestricted individual right to bear arms, and it's why we get lousy court decisions like Citizens United (which may go down in history as the decision that broke our democracy) for that matter.



This Vox article
about a book the writer spent years out talking to rural Americans to write kind of sums it up for me. There's no point. Outnumber and outlegislate and move the hell on.

This is the hard part. We may outnumber them, but the system is set up to give disproportionate legislative (and electoral college) power to the smaller-population, rural states. And if these guns remain legal in "red" states, people can bring them into the "blue" ones to commit their massacres.

No one is a hive mind, though. There are some people who can't be reached or compromised with in any way. Too many. But there may be some who can be still.

Ages ago, I recall reading a cartoon (Doonesbury, I think, but don't quote me on that) where a left-winger and right-winger were discussing the State Of Things, and the right-winger said that the weakness of the left was that they always had to stop to consider other options and points of view, while the right just knew they were correct and didn't have to quibble or debate, just charged ahead. In the last panel, the left-winger conceded he had a point, and the right-winger smugly won. It's a problem that just keeps tripping us up...

This is true, and it's a big challenge facing the Left. The Right is adept these days at turning the Left's arguments back on them. The "you're being intolerant for not tolerating my bigotry" argument is an example of this, as are the appeals to thinly veiled "religious freedom" as an excuse for discriminating against LGBTQ people and for denying women access to contraception.

I'd hate to see the Left become as strident, illogical and uncompromising as many elements of the Right have become.

I think this fight is becoming, more and more, about what Americans are supposed to be and look like.
 
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cornflake

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I think there's a powerful industry driving much of this, as with the rest of our national politics. When there is money to be made, there are lobbies (and politicians) willing to manipulate the masses, so to speak. Guns are big business, and business drives everything. That's why we have a supreme court who has ruled (in defiance of two centuries of precedent) that the second amendment applies to the unrestricted individual right to bear arms, and it's why we get lousy court decisions like Citizens United (which may go down in history as the decision that broke our democracy) for that matter.




This is the hard part. We may outnumber them, but the system is set up to give disproportionate legislative (and electoral college) power to the smaller-population, rural states. And if these guns remain legal in "red" states, people can bring them into the "blue" ones to commit their massacres.

No one is a hive mind, though. There are some people who can't be reached or compromised with in any way. Too many. But there may be some who can be still.



This is true, and it's a big challenge facing the Left. The Right is adept these days at turning the Left's arguments back on them. The "you're being intolerant for not tolerating my bigotry" argument is an example of this, as are the appeals to thinly veiled "religious freedom" as an excuse for discriminating against LGBTQ people and for denying women access to contraception.

I'd hate to see the Left become as strident, illogical and uncompromising as many elements of the Right have become.

I think this fight is becoming, more and more, about what Americans are supposed to be and look like.

Sure, and anyone who wants to spend their time trying to reach out to those people can have at it.

I've got laundry, vacuuming, literally probably 1,000 things I can list that I'm more likely to spend time on than that. I can't rightly explain the level to which I don't care about them, convincing them, making them feel better about anything. I'd rather eliminate the electoral college (which won't happen), and outnumber, outlegislate, and move on.
 

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As an aside, but appropriate for this thread, Fred Meyer, the large west-coast department store retailer, has announced they will stop selling guns. We have at least a half-dozen of these big box stores in my gun-crazy local area (Anchorage, Alaska), so this will probably have some local impact. I doubt that gun sales were a huge part of the chain's bottom line, but it is still a laudable gesture.

caw
 

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Fred Meyers is now owned by Krogers. It was started here in Portland. Guns and ammo were never a big part of their sales, you are right about that. Most of the ones here in Oregon that I've been to had more airsoft and BB/pellet gun stuff than actual firearms or ammo. Guess it differs by locale.
 

Enlightened

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Fred Meyers is now owned by Krogers. It was started here in Portland. Guns and ammo were never a big part of their sales, you are right about that. Most of the ones here in Oregon that I've been to had more airsoft and BB/pellet gun stuff than actual firearms or ammo. Guess it differs by locale.

I remember Fred Meyers, fondly, from my time in Alaska. Sad that it is owned by the chaps behind King Soopers. I see they own Ralphs, Turkey Hill, and many other subsidiaries. Fred Meyer was a good store in Alaska; assuming Kroger may change it. They imported a lot of Scandinavian and Japanese eats and treats, local salmon products, and what not.
 

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Fred Meyers is now owned by Krogers. It was started here in Portland. Guns and ammo were never a big part of their sales, you are right about that. Most of the ones here in Oregon that I've been to had more airsoft and BB/pellet gun stuff than actual firearms or ammo. Guess it differs by locale.

I never saw anything like an AR-15 there, but they have always sold serious high-powered hunting rifles and shotguns, with big racks of them behind the counter.

caw
 

Roxxsmom

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My husband had a job at a Fred Meyers in the early 80s, shortly after the original Fred Meyer had died. There was some sort of conflict within the company then, and it was a chaotic time to be working there with lots of back and forth about how the stores should be run and organized. He remembers spending most of a day stacking a display of PVC pipes in one part of the store, only to have to move it back across the store a few days later. The company survived and seems to have done well, though. As a Californian, I'd never heard of them until I met my husband.

I remember Fred Meyers, fondly, from my time in Alaska. Sad that it is owned by the chaps behind King Soopers. I see they own Ralphs, Turkey Hill, and many other subsidiaries. Fred Meyer was a good store in Alaska; assuming Kroger may change it.

Fred Meyer merged with Kroeger back in 1999, so if they haven't broken it by now, maybe not. They were an early adopter of the no disposable bag policy in Portland too.

Interestingly enough, the chain never made it down into CA, except for Fred Meyer Jewelers. There was a planned expansion some time ago, but they gave up on it.
 
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