Non-Existent Slavery Makes People Own Guns?

Apparently I own a gun because I moved to a state that had slavery one hundred-sixty years ago; almost three decades before my great-grandfather came to America. Or so this column by Maya Srikrishnan claims.

Two recent studies have found more evidence that for many white Americans who advocate for gun rights, it isn’t simply about owning and using a tool, but even more about identity and power.

One of the research papers found that the larger the percentage of enslaved people a U.S. county had in 1860, the higher the rate of gun ownership its residents have today.

For the record, my great-grandfather came to America in the 1880’s and moved to a free state; no slavery. I ended up in this particular southern state almost 130 years later. Somehow, I don’t think this “centuries ago slavery makes people own guns now” claim holds up very well.

This silly assertion by Srikrishnan is based on a bit of questionable “research” titled “Historical prevalence of slavery predicts contemporary American gun ownership.” As you might expect, there are problems.

To identify the county-level distribution of firearms in the United States, we use a tragic, but well-validated proxy measure: the percentage of suicides in the county that are committed with a firearm (40–43).

Really? Let’s look at Buttrick’s citations, which allegedly “well-validate” firearm suicides as a ownership proxy, starting with Siegel.

While such a proxy does exist (the proportion of suicides in a state committed using a gun (FS/S), its correlation with state estimates of gun ownership in recent years is only 0.80.

TL;DR: Firearm suicides are a poor proxy; so we looked for something else, and checked that against 20 year-old surveys of gun ownership.

The next citation is Kleck. Maybe the suicide proxy fares better there.

The results indicate that (1) most measures used in past research have poor validity, making past findings uninterpretable, (2) the best measure for cross-sectional research is the percentage of suicides committed with guns, and (3) there are no known measures that are valid indicators of trends in gun levels, making credible longitudinal research on the subject impossible at present.

TL;DR 2: Suicides make a better proxy than anything else, but still suck so badly that credible research is “impossible.”

Frankly, a brief read of Buttrick’s “past slavery equals guns” paper showed a lot of problems. I even considered a full fisking of it, but realized that if his citations falsify the major point of his claim, it isn’t worth my time to nitpick the silly-ass assumptions.

Nor yours. But feel free, if you’re bored.