Over the past 150 years, American gun owners have changed from seeing weapons primarily as utility farm tools to weapons that provide both physical security and psychological comfort. A gun’s importance to its owner is no longer just a tool for self-defense.
Nick Buttrick, a researcher and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies the psychological relationship millions of Americans have with guns. Buttrick’s research builds on the historical record and shows that in the United States, white Southerners began to develop a tradition of home armories in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, due to insecurity and racial fear. increase. For the rest of the 19th century, these anxieties morphed into the fetishization of firearms, and today gun owners see guns as adding meaning and purpose to their lives.
Speaking about his research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting earlier this month, Buttrick said gun owners see their world as an increasingly turbulent place, and guns are guns. It claims to be a tool for maintaining It recognized the turmoil in the bay. Scientific American We spoke with Buttrick about the psychological roots of gun culture that have contributed to more than 100 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.
[An edited transcript of the conversation follows.]
What are the roots of the U.S. gun ownership obsession? And when did the motivation for owning guns shift from primarily utility and sporting use to use as a defensive tool? mosquito?
Historical sources tell us that early America in the early 18th and early 19th centuries had a different relationship with guns than it does today. Guns were used as tools for hunting, pest control, and other tasks around farms. Advertisements at the time portrayed guns as a life saver, not as a defense. Armed militias existed to repel foreign invaders, but guns were centrally stored in arsenals and not kept separately.
However, the transition began around the time of the Civil War. Gun manufacturing was mechanized and guns were of higher quality, more accurate and in greater numbers. During the war, the U.S. gun industry overheated to keep up with the growing demand, and after the war, people kept their guns. Society was flooded with weapons, and at the same time the rhetoric around them was changing. After the Civil War, the South became a dangerous place where governments collapsed and, in some cases, martial law. Murder rates at the time were estimated to be about 18 times higher in the South than in the North. There have also been changes in the way people talk about guns.
In the absence of police, anarchy, and threats to the order established by liberation, guns became a source of power, able to reestablish order through arms. Redemption, or the white supremacist approach to take back the South, sought to use guns to defeat the perceived threat from blacks to the pre-Civil War order.
Your research showed that the prevalence of slavery in Southern counties predicts the frequency of firearms today. can you explain
After the Civil War, the South was devastated. At the same time, there was this reversal of status, in which previously enslaved people were suddenly emancipated and seized political power. The social structure in which many people grew up was questioned. If you’re a rich white Southerner, or a white, rich white Southerner listening to you, you were wondering how to take back the world where you were on top. spoke very clearly about the need to use guns to suppress black power.
Areas with the highest enslavement rates before the war were now areas with the highest potential political threat from the black population. Our research found that the areas with the highest concentrations of potential black voters also have the highest rates of gun ownership today. Here whites worked hardest to disenfranchise and push back against black power threats. At the time, guns were often talked about as a tool that could control whites and prevent the reorganization of white Southern life. And even today, these areas of the South have the strongest association with the idea that owning a gun will keep you safe.
New ideas spread across the country through friendships and families. So I wanted to get a better idea of the social tendrils that spread out from the South. People take their ideas with them when they move. The best way to track friendship geography we know is on Facebook. Our research used a Facebook tool that looks at how many people are friends with people in different parts of the country. This allowed us to see which southern counties with the highest rates of slavery were most closely tied to the rest of the country. Our research found that locations with the strongest social ties to the South also had the highest rates of gun ownership in the West and North.
You write that guns “enhance the basic psychological needs” of their owners. They provide a sense of identity and add meaning to life. Can you talk about how this manifests itself in the current attitudes of gun owners?
Just as guns were used to recreate strength in the post-Civil War South, guns were also marketed as tools to help their owners regain their masculinity and masculinity after the Civil War was defeated. Many Southerners were trying to figure out who they should be in this new world. Slowly, this template became the dominant way of thinking about guns in modern American life. rice field.
Sociologist Jennifer Carlson has done a lot of research to show that today’s guns are used for much the same purpose.Carlson previously staked her identity on her ability to provide for her family. It may have been, but those marginalized in the modern economy are looking for other tools to enhance these needs, and guns claim to be one of them. these tools. If you look at gun magazines and marketing advertisements published by the National Rifle Association over the last 40 years, gun manufacturers have adopted and implemented this idea. Advertisements have moved toward using guns for masculinity rather than hunting, and are becoming more “paternal” as protectors of the family. It’s now a very American idea that if you want to control space, you need a gun to do it.
As for identity, the best evidence I’ve shown in the lab comes from asking a group of gun owners and non-owners how they’re feeling throughout the day via text message. We asked them how meaningful their lives were and how much they thought they could control them. and tells us that he felt he had more control over it.
You explored this idea of guns inherent in the psychology of gun owners using an experiment involving electric shocks. Can you take us through that experiment?
We’ve done something out of the classic psychological toolbox here. He threatened people with electric shocks. We brought them into the lab and hooked them up to the shock generator. The shock was not as powerful. Still, people don’t like it, and when they’re warned they’re going to be in shock, they see a psychological reaction. They generally sweat and become more tense.
What we’re trying to see is whether guns help you feel safe in one situation, and whether they help you feel safe in another situation where you’re about to be shocked. In the lab, the gun had no internal firing mechanism, but resembled a real gun. Again, there is no physical way a gun can help protect you in this situation.
Still, we wanted to see if guns helped participants cope with the immediate threat of electric shock. The threat of shock wasn’t too bad.It slowed my heart rate and made me feel more relaxed than when I was holding a metal object as heavy as a gun. Conversely, non-owners were much more nervous when holding a gun than when holding a metal object.
Given what you know about the gun owner’s psychology and its connection to identity, what are we doing wrong when it comes to stopping gun violence in the United States?
Gun control is politically difficult. Because when we talk about gun control, we’re talking about attacking a very fundamental part of the gun owner’s psyche. It’s tough politics when guns are important to the identity of nearly a third of the population. People don’t like to give up a core part of who they think they are. We need to look to what is there. Gun suicides and mass shootings are a huge problem, and in some ways these are preventable deaths.
Suicides and accidental deaths from guns are equally unpoliticized because no one wants someone to shoot themselves or a child to accidentally get a gun. Finding ways to get people to store their weapons properly so that it becomes harder to reach for them in the dark moments when you’re contemplating shooting someone is an important starting point.
We need to move away from the idea that guns are dangerous objects that should be respected and that they should be within reach at all times. Just putting a small obstacle in the way can help people reconsider using guns in certain situations, and then that his two-minute dark window will help someone make an irreparable move. It is more likely that it will pass without you taking it.
