freedmen's bureau slavery guns
By Waud, Alfred R. (Alfred Rudolph), 1828-1891, artist. - http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c05555Harper's weekly, 1868 July 25, p. 473., Public Domain, Link

In 1860, 5 years before the legal end to slavery in the U.S., some counties, especially in the south, had more enslaved people.

Researchers looking at the trends in gun ownership across the states find these slavery statistics may reflect why some residents have more guns in the present.

In an attempt to understand trends in gun ownership across the USA, researchers described a shift in sentiment away from the predominant, pre-Civil War idea of guns as tools for hunting and sport and particularly in the south, a post-Civil War belief that a gun was necessary to protect the family.

The team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered over 45% of the world’s civilian-owned firearms are held by those living in the united states – a country that only holds 5% of the global population today.

This disparity may be due to how American gun owners view gun ownership, showing that U.S. history, tied to slavery and white supremacy, may have affected how people hold to their military values in the modern day.

This disparity across the US has been speculated to have been caused by differences in historical beliefs as to why personal gun ownership is needed. areas with stronger connections to slavery and white supremacy may continue to promote pro-military and self-protection attitudes that result in high ownership of firearms.

Nick Buttrick, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor of psychology, said: “What we see is a strong correlation between the number of slaves in a county in 1860 and the number of guns there now, even after we control for variables like personal politics, crime rates, and education and income.”

— Open Access Government in Modern American Gun Ownership Values Can Be Linked to Slavery

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

103 COMMENTS

      • ding, ding, ding.
        my kid and his girl just moved there for her grad studies. nice, pretty girl. bites her tongue hard around me.
        that town is wacko.

        • I hope your son is doing alright, not just following a girlfriend around like a puppy dog. Twenty years ago, when I went to grad school, it was my wife following me across the country.

        • “…not just following a girlfriend around like a puppy dog.”

          Depending on the girl, that can be just fine… 🙂

      • Who else is a little disappointed to hear that Americans only own 45% of the privately owned firearms in the world? I expected better of us than that. I guess we all need to buy a few more.

      • Not all slaves came from Africa, anonymous. Many were European, which comports with the exceedingly low percentage of MT blacks.

        • My ancestors came over from Ireland to work alongside of the ” coolies” for pennies a day laying track for the railroad robber barons. If a worker died during the days labor, the rest of the crew was allowed to take a short break to drag the corpse far enough away to keep the buzzards from disturbing the work.
          Most were envious of the black railslaves, whom were at least treated like an investment.
          Can someone point me towards the reparations line for not-bipocs ??

  2. Correlation does not equal causation. Perhaps they realize; after the lesson of the Civil War, that the federal government will march into your home and take all of what you have.

    • Reading the article was an impromptu study on nick butthead. The only conclusion is nick butthead is a butthead.

      Slavery was found everywhere in the US and not just in the South as History rewriting democRats want fools to believe. At the time if you could afford to buy a slave you purchased one like a lawnmower, etc. Of course to enslave a human being is a really sick idea so it was ended the hard way.

      The legacy of slavery belongs to the democRat Party. And it was democRats who concocted Gun Control laws to prevent slaves and Freemen from owning firearms back then and today the democRat Party continues to carry around their same old buckets of Gun Control Rot. I suspect one day the Rot inherent with Gun Control will have to end the hard way too.

      • Maybe these counties that had more slaves then ended up with more freed slaves and more descendants of freed slave. Could be all those guns are owned by descendants of former slaves to protect their freedom.

      • The idiot that wrote the article knows less about the South than Harriet Beecher Stowe and that’s saying something. The next excuse to trample on part of the country that the marxists don’t agree with will be to force the shutdown of fossil fuel production to ” save the planet “.

  3. Back at a point a bit over 100 years ago there were “scientists” who believed that the shape of the human skull determined a person’s intelligence, and that black people were not as smart as white people because of the shape of their skulls.

    This race baiting is the phrenology of our time. Along with transgenderism.

  4. Correlation does not equal causation.

    And other countries had slavery long before the USA existed and long after too.

    Even into the mid 1850s, white people did not venture beyond the African coast because of the tropical diseases. They bought slaves enslaved by other blacks. Some history is very inconvenient to modern narratives.

    • “They bought slaves enslaved by other blacks. Some history is very inconvenient to modern narratives.“

      I often see this expressed, but it’s not clear to me what the point is.

      Is your position that because the black slaves were enslaved by other blacks, the white Americans who bought, sold, beat and killed them have no responsibility?

      • whiner is so pathetically laughable.
        He fails to recognize the fact that his progtards broke the pathological altruism bell years ago.

        Hey whiner, the trolls from 20 years ago called. They want their white guilt inducing tool back.

        Are you still using dial up internet too? How many minutes do you have left on your AOL account? 🤣🤡🤣

        https://youtu.be/2q35PgSXhKg

      • Sure, they have responsibility, miner. Find me one of those white slave owners today and I will stone him myself.

        Do you still rage against all Germans and Japanese because of what their forbears did during ww2?

        I accept guilt only for what I have done. Collectively blaming a race is, well, racist.

        • jwm,

          MajorStupidity, a RAYCISSS???? Say it ain’t so!!!

          He’s a lying, Leftist/fascist progtard piece of canine feces, OF COURSE he’s a racist. No one is more racist than a Dimocrat/”Progressive”/Leftist/fascist idiot . . . and MajorStupidity is ALL of those.

        • It would be different if miner and dacian were using the ‘America is racist and slavery proves it’ meme to help modern blacks in America. But that is not their concern. It is used to keep White people, like biden and pelosi in power.

          Look at the top ranks of the dems. Very, very white. And they are being funded and controlled by white corporate billionaires. gates, zuckerberg, bloomberg, soros.

        • jwm,

          EVERYTHING they do is for power. Leftist/fascists only care about power; they ineptly try to disguise it with “cover claims”, like racism (of which THEY are far more guilty), sexism (ditto), classism (trifecta), etc. They hate the people they CLAIM to care about, and claim they do all their fascism to “protect them from themselves”.

          They come in two flavors, actually stupid (dacian the demented), or risibly lying @$$holes (who are also stupid), like MajorStupidity.

      • The point is that we never see you jacka$$es campaigning for reparations or even apologies from blacks, who essentially are the original enslavers of all other blacks, or Arabs, who bought more slaves for longer than anyone in the west, are still at it, and treated their slaves far worse, or black and Arab north African Muslims who enslaved more Europeans than Europeans ever did Africans. And you never ask for reparations FOR the Slavs who were so often ensalved that they gave their ethnic name to it as slave derives from Slav.

        So I guess the real point is you and yours are a bunch of raciss hypocrites who just hate YT.

      • Slavery is not the unique responsibility of any ethnicity or race, obviously. Accusing white Americans (and the several thousand black American slave owners) of any special responsibility for the global institution of slavery is merely domination for political and financial gain.

      • Beat and killed is a no-fly. Slaves were wealth. They represented an investment. Would you destroy your tractor because it wouldn’t start one morning Yes. some low IQ folk would out of pique, but any semi-intelligent slave owner realized that he had big bucks invested in his slaves and generally treatment wasn’t as bad as portrayed in modern literature or period anti-slavery literature. If one thinks that slaves were poorly housed, fed and clothed, one only needs look at how poor, free white folks were housed, fed and clothed. During WWI and WWII, a great many volunteers from the south were rejected for military service due to diet deficiency induced medical conditions such as pellagra, beri-beri, rickets, low IQ all as a result of diet insufficiency. For those who have difficulty with history, WWI was some 60 years ≠ after the War of Northern Aggression.

    • You have to remember that since March 2, 1807, it was illegal to import slaves into the US. The slaves that were sold from Africa pretty much stopped by that time. Very few slave ships flew an American flag, since the trade was almost a monopoly. Cotton and textiles went to Europe and Africa by European ships and slaves came back. Most of the ships were European and the slave runners were African and Arabic.
      We also have to remember that many Irish were cleared from land stolen by English “Gentlemen” and were shipped to the Americas(and force bred to Africans) – later, they were shipped to Australia. White slaves were held by Arabs and forcibly sterilized. This was in the west, other slaves were taken through out Asia.
      It was all wrong, so tell the whole truth, not just some bs made up for the lower classes.

  5. University researchers have tied gun murders to water. Their studies have drawn a correlation to the casual intake of water or water-based liquids and guns; in fact their studies seem to indicate a very large percentage of shooters had consumed water at some point in their past.
    The Biden administration has promised to award an additional fifty million dollars to researchers to continue studying this correlation.
    On an unrelated note, researchers have also begun to study the path ofthe sun ; they claim it nearly always sets in the west. Stay tuned

    • “University researchers have tied gun murders to water. Their studies have drawn a correlation“

      Could you please elaborate on what studies by what universities you’re speaking of, thanks!

      • Sorry miner, you knowhow this all works. The exact facilities and personnel involved in such leading edge research must remain super-top-secret until all of the funding has been exhausted and the findings are published on some obscure peer group periodical.
        It’s like the location of the super-secret federal penitentiary that is housing the millions of background-check paperwork violators that only your cohort dacian knows the location of… we could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you.

        • hey p-nut, a question for you.
          If they killed miner, would his fantasy land alternative identities ( dacian, Sir Albert, etc.) also die along with him?

        • In a word, hopefully. Also, since unicorns are only real to prepubescent girls, maybe you should think about changing your handle . Maybe something like “Rhinoceros Screamer”

      • Wow! How clueless can one get? No, that is not a challenge, it is a rhetorical question. Miner, you take the clueless prize for the day.

    • “University researchers have tied gun murders to water.”

      Good parody, that.

  6. I’m guessing the logical conclusion to this tripe is that black gun owners represent the modern day “slave traders”.

    How much was this study funded to determine “feeling unsafe is more likely to predict increased gun ownership.”.

    • If it’s anything like committee, commission, and public funded social impact “research” done in NY the answer is you don’t want to know. Especially when it gets prioritized before basic infrastructure.

  7. More leftist gobblydegook from someone who has never did any real work for even one day in their lives

    • Does working on the student dining halls for work-study money qualify as work? I suspect that is the closest that Butthead ever came to labor for $$$ in his life.

  8. This is fantastic research and I agree wholeheartedly. I have been working on a similar research project showing global warming is inversely correlated to the number of pirates that exist in the Caribbean. I’m going to petition the UN for 500 billion in funding to create an island pirate nation where we raid passerby in galleons. This is absolutely critical to protecting the future of our children.

    • Count me in !
      Sidebar: did anyone else notice in the fbi list of flags/symbols supposedly associated with insurrectionists the pirate ☠ flag isn’t there?
      Maybe dems are ok with pirates.
      Pirates surely have higher standards and morals than dems though.

  9. Switzerland has the highest gun ownership rate in Europe, but I don’t remember them having more slaves than the rest Europe. US also has more cars per capita. I guess that’s from longing for the days when slaves carried us around. Maybe Buttrick went into psychology because he didn’t have the math and reasoning skills to do rigorous science.

    • Honestly a lot of academics are just lazy people. They need to oftentimes get published to hold onto their jobs. A lazy study like this will fly under the radar without being questioned and allow them to retain their jobs.

      • But with a socially acceptable title and progressive focus on those needing othering we get to pay for more of this ones education regardless of whatever mathematical inconsistency or illogical scope it may have.

  11. I have never owned any slaves. No one that I know has ever owned any slaves. Junk science, from “gun” control to COVID is extremely dangerous. Most academics are disgusting leftists who would sanction murder if it would help their cause.

    • Golly how many black slaves lived in Cook county,ILL annoy in 1860??? None would be my best guess. What a maroon. Hundreds of thousands of white folks died to set those black slaves free-from Dims. Those are stats you can count on.

      • Wonder how many of the gun owners in the regions he covered were descendants of slaves and if so how were they counted and evaluated in the data? Wait that would involve work nuance and an interesting topic with rigorous academic review so probably never bothered with.

        • Good point. Decendents of people that said that’s not happening again.
          That would take accual hours of work and doesn’t fit the pre determined conclusion.

      • conversly i’d suggest that mchenry county has more guns than anywhere.
        before counties, illinois, wisconsin, missouri and indiana were part of the french trade. as late as 1818 slavery was illegal, but existing ones were not to be freed.

      • Lincoln owned slaves even as he was lying dying.. He willed them to his sister and those slaves showed up on his sisters census!!!

        There were a few northerners who owned slaves, there even blacks in the USA who owned slaves…

        Fun to watch a series that was airing a while back on about famous peoples ancestory and have American Africans stunned to learn that their black ancestors in America owned slaves after they were freed!!!

    • So why should those who never owned slaves pay “reparations” for those who never were slaves?

  13. This doesn’t explain gun ownership in the Southwest or the Intermountain west.
    Slavery wasn’t allowed, yet gun laws are amongst the nation’s least restrictive and gun ownership rates are high.

  15. Just as likely, all the newly freed slaves realized gun ownership was one way to protect themselves from those who would harm them?

    That desire for self-protection could easily have been handed down for multiple generations.

  16. There is a proven “corelation” to communities that have socialist-democrat governments and rising violent crime rates. Many would argue that this is also ‘causation’.

  17. Ahhhh yet another ‘Correlation equals causation’ study.

    Aside from the fact that its impossible for correlation to equal causation, yet more race centered baiting for stupid study funding.

    The second false premise of this study is trying to treat gun ownership like a medical condition infection. This hints at the origin of them using medical disease spread analytical dynamics. If you follow the link to the article at > https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/american-gun-ownership-slavery/142107/ > you will find this nugget of false equivalency…

    “Buttrick said: ‘The question is, how do these ideas about guns get to the rest of the country? As people move, they bring with them the culture that formed them. We can see the remnants of those moves and the lingering connections to family and community in people’s social media connections, and it lines up with the slavery-gun-ownership pattern.’

    Notice how its a ‘pattern’ of ‘spread’ e.g. ‘The question is, how do these ideas about guns get to the rest of the country? As people move, they bring with them the culture that formed them.” – now think about a disease, for example COVID and play a little word substitution like this > “‘The question is, how does COVID get to the rest of the country? As people move, they bring with them the infection.”

    Notice how the conclusion omits any other possibility, like for example, people living in a crime ridden society and the most basic human instinct of survival demands a means to protect against the criminal predators. Ya think that has something to do with it maybe?

    This points out another problem with the study. Its tailored to have a pre-formed conclusion that it started with, and omits any other reasoning.

  18. Lol. They’re not going to give up on this “no, really it’s the people who WON’T ban your guns that are racist” nonsense while using the government lawyers and taxpayer dollars to argue in court that “yes, these bans are racist and here’s why that’s a good thing.”

  20. Should we….should we show Nick Buttrick the entirely racist origin story of gun control in the U.S.?

    Someone needs to un-gaslight the entire left and remind them who were the biggest proponents for slavery and segregation (hint, it was not the Republicans).

    • It should be done. Unfortunately the Leftists will never believe any of it. A mind is like a parachute; it only works when open.

  21. There is nothing new in this article. Its long been known that white hatred of minorities both racial and religious is what has been the real reason for gun ownership in the U.S. The “naked ape” has been tribal since long before civilization even came into being.

    Breaking the tribal ignorance barrier of the Far Right, who’s lives center on breeding children and teaching them to be fearful and hateful of anyone different than themselves has been an almost insurmountable task because this is the hallmark of their very existence. Their real religion is racism, hate, bigotry, discrimination, and xenophobia.

    A Trump utopia is the wish of the Far Right to turn back the clock to granting constitutional rights only to themselves, enslaving women for sex, and establishing once again a White Protestant Caliphate.

    As President Obama said “”They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” In other words they were prime targets for demagogue’s like Herr Drumpf, who like Hitler, knew how to push their buttons to gain their undying support. Its all about racism and their fearing anyone being different than themselves. They are the prime example of the vicious, and ignorant “naked ape”.

    The irony of it all and the poetic justice of it all is that when the Far Right load up with guns in the home it is they themselves that end up killing their own family members as a result of their own paranoia, not the bogy men they fear and hate that might come at them out of the fog and the night. The bloody Statistics prove it beyond all doubt which also proves that the Far Right are always their own worst enemies.

    The real question is “Can you ever eradicate the ignorance of the Far Right? Unfortunately we will never find out or have the opportunity to do so as global warming is now increasing at a rate far faster than previously predicted and the blind greed of the Far Right will destroy the human race and most living creatures in just another few short years. Nature indeed finds a way to cause the extinction of existing species which have outlived their natural span of existence. This is so because it is time for various new species to take their place and develop on the planet, assuming it does not become completely uninhabitable.

    Yes the “naked ape” was too intelligent to survive as long as previous species did like the dinosaurs, who existed for Hundreds of millions of years. The “naked ape” burned up his planet and destroyed himself in just a few millions years. Tribalism and Racial Hate and of course Blind greed did have its place in Natures overall scheme of things.

    And if you think this summer was outrageously hot, you ain’t seen nothin yet, wait till next summer when the over worked electrical grid fails because even our hydroelectrical power will be inoperative due to a lack of flowing water to power it. It will become even too hot to work, crops will fail, food will run out and people will starve to death and also die from heat exposure.

    Long before the invention of Christianity and Judaism the Zoroastrians predicted the world would one day be destroyed by fire and in a way they were not to far off their predictions.

    • There is nothing new in this article. Its long been known that white hatred of minorities both racial and religious is what has been the real reason for gun ownership in the U.S.

      Right. That huge ass population of minorities in Montana and Idaho, bastillions of civil war era history of slavery. That explains all the guns up there. Or maybe the real reason, is you guys are full of shit.

      And if you think this summer was outrageously hot, you ain’t seen nothin yet, wait till next summer when the over worked electrical grid fails because even our hydroelectrical power will be inoperative due to a lack of flowing water to power it. It will become even too hot to work, crops will fail, food will run out and people will starve to death and also die from heat exposure.

      Well. Then I guess we’ll miss out on your dumb shit comments, and your endless quest to divide the country based on race.

    • Just shut the fuck up, you blithering moron! No one reads your demented bullshit, Jerry in a basement in Ohio, and even fewer believe even one word of it. You’re a repeat-offender proven liar, but I suppose you’re still slightly useful… as the subject of mockery and ridicule!

      Oh, and by the way… you sure do have a fetish for naked apes, don’t you? Bestiality suits you well, I shouldn’t be surprised by it.

      Mental illness can be debilitating, Vlad/All Hail/Duncian, so please seek psychological help – you desperately need it.

    • Define far right.

      Define racism.

      Somehow your rants don’t add up to how most people define these things.

    • How do you explain a huge swath’s of blacks that are democats are leaving the Democats PLANTATION to become Republicans!!!

      Those that accuse others of RACISM, they themselves harbor that RACISM and hold those beliefs!!!!!

    • So you believe that the ELITE will protect you from the hoards that you are predicting..

      My say you will take the easy way out, with you are starving and sitting in the dark..

      And when you do tell the Devil/Satan hi!!!

    • “There is nothing new in this article……”

      Finally something we can ALL agree on. 👍

      💯% fact that scum like you and yours have been using pathological altruism for decades.
      Some things NEVER change.

  22. “I believe there is no peace now, and there will never be peace, so long as one rules over another…” – Voltairine de Cleyre

  23. I’m pretty sure this is the most moronic thing I’ve heard, since the last time Biden opened his mouth. I guess I must consider the source, and just let it stand there.

  25. If your the kind of person that spends life thinking about race, chances are pretty good that YOUR the racist.

  26. Ironically a great many of the slaves from Africa were sold into Slavery by their African tribal enemies. As a means to remove them from any possible reprisal in response to the conjuring of their lands. Those tribes profited greatly in terms of $$$, trade goods and modern weapons. to be used in turn to conjure more enemy tribes and provide more slaves for sale and thus acquire more $$$, trade goods and modern weapons. Unfortunately this distasteful part of the Black Slavery story has been conveniently left out by the Liberal Progressive Democrat Educational Indoctrination system. That once provided these and other facts to the students under their tutelage,

  27. Not buying this claim for a moment. Any legit, statistically valid correlation there have been post-Civil War has had 157 years to be diluted. Meaning there will be one hell of a lot of correlations to link gun ownership too.

  29. Is it racism to want to protect ourselves from the people that are targeting the good people of our country. Remember, the good people include all minorities and they want protection from those that wish to harm them also. It isn’t racist, is is getting rid of the trash. Trash comes in all colors. Who do I want living next door. The guy that owns a business or works as a professional or tradesman, or the guy who sells drugs, has neer do wells hanging around and they are breaking into our homes to steal items to buy drugs?
    Hint: color doesn’t matter – character does. Why is it that many young gang bangers today think MLK was an Uncle Tom?
    Give me a break. There are good people of all races, and bad people of all racis. Let’s put the bad ones in jail and send a message that crime doesn’t pay.

  31. My neighbor now owns 3/4ths of the plantation his ancestors were slaves on and he grew up in a share croppers shack on. I own the rest of the land. if anything, he is further right than I am and does own more guns than I do. Guess he is also a white supremist as well. Which he would find amusing since he happens to be black.
    The majority of these studies on firearms ownership, as well as racism or white fragility or supremacy start with preconceived conclusions and work to prove their ideas/theories.

  33. Whilst I understand the resulting criticism to the opening comment I have to ask myself two question here
    ONE. Is that opening comment correct? In other words IS there a proven connection or-
    TWO. Is that opening comment incorrect and there is NO proven CONNECTION.
    If it is correct then no amount of ranting and raving can alter that fact and if it is incorrect calm down, turn off the bile, and bloody well PROVE it. To simply dismiss as some kind of LEFTIE, COMMIE, LIBERAL, political ploy when you obviously have no idea what those words even mean, does your cause or you opinions however slanted they be any good at all. All it does is to make you look rather naive.

  34. It’s all B.S. and it’s two main points are easily proven as fictitious for how they are based. The U.S. having just 5% of the Worlds population but 45% of the Worlds civilian owned firearms never mentions civilian firearm ownership restrictions in the other 95% of the world! China has 19% of the Worlds population and almost zero private firearms ownership. We need look no further than he U.Ks elimination of slavery (33 years prior to the U.S.) which long held “class” system topped by a Monarchy (White, Lol) yet there was no noticable expansion of firearms ownership among the population. The ever increasing firearms ownership in the U.S. is solely because “We Can” which is often influnced by crime and political threats and not by race peddlers.

  36. There were no slaves in Detroit. I am sure some might have passed through. Being former slaves.
    Last time I renewed my CPL at Wayne County Sheriff. I was a minority. There were 12 others there. All black and all women. I guess, double minority….
    By the way. The Queen(just passed) she did not own slaves. And GB outlawed slavery in the 1830’s. And there was no war that killed +600,000 citizens.

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