This is a study by a german group that found....amazingly.....that the primary driver of gun ownership is fear....of criminals.....and that in order to push gun control and disarming gun owners, there will need to be a way to erase this fear of criminals from the gun owner's mind.......
Now the question......do left wing, anti-gunners think there is no such thing as violent criminal attack? Or governments that murder their own people? And this, coming from a German......do they teach German history in German schools?
So.....as one response to the article pointed out.....is buying a fire extinguisher, car insurance, home insurance teaching kids stop, drop and roll....are they acts of fear, or acts of intelligence...?
New Study: Handgun Owners Are Motivated By Fear - The Truth About Guns
“New research finds the strongest motivation to buy handguns is the vague but deeply held perception that we live in a dangerous world,” psmag.com reports. Huh. Who’d a guessed it?
Ah, but the troika of academics behind Is It a Dangerous World Out There?: The Motivational Bases of American Gun Ownership reckon that handgun buyers are motivated by “two distinct impulses.”
Which would be “the specific perceived threat of assault, and a diffuse threat of a dangerous world.” So it’s the difference between that guy might try to kill me vs. someone might try to kill me. Guess which one’s the stronger of the two?
A research team led by University of Groningen psychologist Wolfgang Stroebe [not shown] reports that second, vague notion of potential peril is the stronger of the two—and the one most resistant to rethinking.
Wait. Who said that handgun owners need to stop thinking they live in a dangerous world? Why would they want to do that? Oh right.
Someone who doesn’t want Americans to keep and bear handguns! ‘Cause if they “rethought” their world view, seeing the world for the unicorn pooping rainbows place that it really is, they’d stop buying and carrying handguns and the world would be safer!
Yeah, not buying it.
“This [resistance] could make it difficult to conduct persuasion campaigns aimed at dissuading handgun owners of the need to own a gun (or support limitations on gun ownership),” they write. That’s because “a broader system of beliefs about the nature of the social world, and what people are like, is extremely difficult to influence.”
Not to go all Godwin’s Law, but perhaps Goebbels‘ ghost would like to opine on how anti-gunners could “influence” gun owners’ “broader system of beliefs about the nature of the social world” to convince handgun owners to surrender their firearms or make it exceedingly difficult for a civilian to own one?
No matter how you look at it, this particular piece of academic anti-gun animus is a special blend of stupid and scary. Which is why the Huffington Post was on it like Scott Diseck on anything female. Their story New Study Says Fear of Crime, Danger Drives American Handgun Ownership is helpfully sub-headed Handgun owners are more fearful of crime, even when it is unlikely.
“While the primary goal of the research is to serve as a building block for further study, Stroebe does think there’s some practical application. ‘If we want to help people conquer their fears, we have to recognize that a sense of threat can have multiple layers and each layer may have to be addressed separately,’ he said.”
