While not all gun owners are racist (obviously), a growing body of research suggests that hostility to gun control is less about belief that guns are a “right” and more about white paranoia about people of color and crime.
Last year, social scientists Alexandra Filindra and Noah J. Kaplan
published a study in the journal Political Behavior that found that showing pictures of black people to white people reduced white support for gun control. The effect was much stronger in white people who held higher levels of racial prejudice.
“Juxtapositions of ‘law abiding citizens’ and ‘criminals’ [are] evocative of racialized themes as crime has
long been associated with blacks in the white mind,” the researchers wrote.
Gun ownership is a way of “expressing my ‘more-equal-than-others’ status in a society where egalitarianism is the norm,”
Filindra told the Washington Post.
This confirms previous research,
published in PLoS One in 2013 that found that the more racist a white person is, the likelier he is to own a gun.