An Interesting Read

First noticed in comments at this post, here's an interesting piece called "Gun Risk" Perceptions from The Cultural Cognition Project at Yale Law School.

Although we've known this for a long time, it's nice to see our institutes of higher learning "getting it".

Persons who hold egalitarian and communitarian worldviews worry more about crime and gun accidents, an anxiety that coheres with their negative association of guns with patriarchy, racism, and selfish indifference to the well-being of others.

Persons of a hierarchical and individualistic worldviews, in contrast, tend to see guns as safe, and worry much more about the danger of being rendered defenseless against attack; this perception of risk coheres with their positive associations of guns with traditional social roles (father, protector, provider) and individualistic virtues (self-reliance, courage, physical prowess).

There's also links to other related studies, but seeing as they're written by folks with big vocabularies, I haven't read them.

They don't teach the K.I.S.S. principle at Yale, do they? ;-)

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