Racism link with gun ownership and opposition to gun control in white Americans

A local news show was asking if skin color makes a person more or less likely to shoot the other person. If it's a black male, the answer was "yes." No surprise there.

You've just singlehandedly proven that belief in the 2nd Amendment is wrong. Hooray! Glad someone finally settled the issue. Apparently, I've been a racist all these years and never knew it.

It can be a false correlation. People can believe in a right to gun ownership, as part of their local culture. They can also be racist, since that too can be part of the local culture. However, one does not need to cause the other.

No, that is correlation. I think you mean it's not causation.

I was under the impression that when people refer to correlation, they are really implying that there is causation. In the dictionary, it seems to infer that it can be one definition, that correlation implies causation. But, if you see a more nuanced defintion, you might be thinking differently than many a colloquial speaker? Anyway, for something to correlate, it does imply that there is a relationship, where two things both seem to be evident, perhaps by a third thing causing both? Now, what would white racism, and gun ownership, both have as a common denominator? I'll take a wild guess: a feeling of potential threat from those that do not live in one's respective group? So, rather than "racism" being a link with "oppostion to gun control in white Americans," the word "racism" can be replaced with the word "paranoia"?

You are definitely mixing correlation with causation

http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/science/correlation-vs-causation

Anyone who uses correlation to imply causation is committing a logical fallacy.

Your paranoia theory is looking at causation, but you don't have any data and you haven't explained why there are any non-racist paranoids, particularly those who own guns more than average.

Correlation if you have reliable data and some stats background is easy. Causation usually much more difficult.

What a crock of ****. "And racism was already strongly associated with having a gun in the home."

Feel free to post the data that supports your interesting 'crock of ****' theory Baldi.

You mean studies done to show that gun owners are not racist?

Not that in particular, anything that supports your theory.

I do believe you are drawing a long bow assuming correlation = fait accompli

Paranoia comes in different situations. One can be paranoid about choking while eating a meal, so one counts the number of times one chews a mouthful of food.. Or, one can be paranoid about the day turning rainy, so one always carries an umbrella. One can be paranoid about people that one has heard might be less oriented towards civil behavior, so one wants to have a weapon in one's home. And, those less civil folks can correlate with tatoos, being loners, drifters, or even other races. In my opinion, gun owners might not want a gun, due to feelings of racism, but perhaps feelings of paranoia about Martians landing. The fact that a study correlated racism and gun ownership might not have focussed on a correlation between fear (aka, paranoia) of Martians invading, or of drifters, or of societal collapse, or of packs of feral dogs. So many things for a study to discern as the reason some people want a firearm. Racism might be a co-factor to many others fears, so isolating racism as the "link" might be just a false conclusion.

The study reports a correlation. You can't dispute thatwithout new data or examining the methods they used to analyse their data.correlation is not a causal 'link', it is a statically significant coincidence, nothing more.