But the NRA’s position official position so far is “no comment.” Why?
One possible explanation is the NRA has an uneasy alliance with police. Both police unions and the NRA are conservative groups, and many police officers are also gun owners and NRA members. The NRA, then, has an interest in not upsetting police…
But there’s another, more obvious explanation: Castile was black, and gun ownership in America — down to the NRA’s messaging — is largely built on white identity.
Notice how the left defaults to assuming every action is a stab at forming political alliances, and manipulating events. Morals play no role.
Obviously the NRA isn’t getting into it because this appears it may be a case of things going wrong between two groups of K-strategists, in the way they periodically will when people are in the arena of life. The cop probably thought he was going for a gun, he thought the cop wanted his ID, and things just went wrong – it happens. If you could see yourself on each side of the equation, you could see yourself making either mistake. Once you see that, it is difficult to be too judgmental. Everyone on the right would have done the same thing had the citizen been white.
The article did have an interesting little item in it:
A 2015 study, published in the journal Political Behavior, looked at survey data going back to the 1990s, finding a strong correlation between opposition to gun control and levels of racial resentment.
But the results only found a correlation, so the researchers dug deeper. They asked nearly 1,200 white participants a series of questions online about gun laws. But one half of the group first looked at pictures of white and black people from an implicit association test — to make them think about race — while the other half did not.
The researchers found that white participants who were primed by the pictures were more likely to oppose gun control than white participants who didn’t see the images. What’s more, primed participants who reported higher levels of racial resentment were even more likely to oppose gun control than primed participants who reported lower levels of racial resentment.
They tried to turn it into gun ownership being a subconscious assertion of white racism, but obviously if that technique of manipulating perceptions works that way on whites, it will work that way on blacks, Hispanics, and so on.
If that study’s results are real, then most likely, if a person of one race rarely interacts with other races, pictures of other races would be substantially different enough from the normally-encountered to light up the amygdala, which would be flagging all of the subtle differences as novel and potentially important. As an amygdala stimulant, it would be similar to mortal salience, and precipitate a more K-psychology, desirous of the ability to defends oneself and one’s loved ones. Suddenly rendering yourself helpless through supporting gun control would seem a lot less intelligent.
It is interesting to me, as I viewed the prospect of the Donald picking a black running mate as an obviously advantageous option, since it would attract some component of the black vote. A commenter here maintained that it would cost more white votes than it would gain, and he might even lose because of it.
I have no idea if that is true or not, but I was looking at the raw mechanism outside of the human decision making component. It is important to realize that when judging the outcomes of various options, the mind, and the triggering and assuaging of the amygdala in the background, can make what would seem an obvious mechanism of the world, outside of humans, completely moot.
Even a subconscious stimulus, which someone would barely register, can get neuron’s firing which they don’t even feel. Yet once that brain structure comes online, it will alter the subsequent decision making process enough to make people reverse their positions – and make them think they have done so purely through their own logical abilities. Ask about gun control in a mixed race crowd, and you could get the exact opposite results to what you would get in a single race crowd – and the person giving their opinion would have no idea why they answered as they did.
The understanding of that aspect of cognition is an amazing power to behold – and it is even more amazing when you realize that one of the Presidential candidates right now appears to have it.
[…] Subconscious Relationship Between Guns And In-grouping […]
Leftist projections notwithstanding, the NRA probably hasn’t commented for two more prudent reasons:
(a) No one has confirmed that Castile actually had a Minnesota permit to carry, as the state does not comment publicly on that status as a matter of policy; in fact, while his criminal history does not contain any violent offenses, he may have been ineligible to have one at all, specifically with respect to his citations for use of a controlled substance and his alleged ties to organized gangs; and
(b) Whether he had a legal right to carry the handgun found in his car is immaterial to whether the police shooting was justified; in other words, when assessing whether a suspect is threatening them with a deadly weapon, the legal status of that deadly weapon is typically not a factor in an LEO’s assessment.
The latter point is especially confounding as a leftist point of contention, as they typically go to great lengths to determine whether mass shooters obtained their guns legally, then tout that status as further damnation of the American “gun culture”. The NRA is generally not expected to release a statement defending the mass shooters in these cases, nor does it obviate the culpability of the mass shooter in the eyes of the average leftist.
One wonders, if Castile’s weapon was carried legally, if the leftist media would expect the NRA to support him had he shot and killed the two police officers stopping him. But then the more likely outcome of that scenario is that none of us outside of Minnesota would have ever heard of him.
Bias is well studied in the field of jury selection. One of the implicit biases is race. There are the expected biases (white against black defendants, black jurors sympathetic black defendants, etc), but what is unexpected is how easy it is to correct virtually all of these biases (to the point that the detected bias is within the margin of error).
You make people conscious of the bias, and then you leave it alone.
It was done perfectly at the Zimmerman trial. The Defense brought up the subject, saying (paraphrasing) “some people have tried to make this about race, but that isn’t why you are here today — you are here to decide the facts.” And then they left it alone. And that was the perfect way to dispel the bias.
Trump could do the same thing — even adding in a “there you go again” when someone else brings its up — and all the negatives associated with a black candidate would disappear.