Todd Stauffer wrote an interesting blog about the nutty things those Salon writers are telling us about open carry.
An interesting piece in Salon this week seems to have discovered (bless their little San Francisco hearts) that ‘open carry’ is a “new craze” (ahem) out here in flyover country.
But, now that they’ve caught on, the piece does take a fascinating look at some of the psychology of open carry and presents a case for the idea that open carry actually contributes to violence instead of curbing it.
How can that be? Here’s a couple of the key points they make:
People with guns tend to see guns, even when they’re not there. Result: higher chance of shooting an unarmed “threat.”
A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that when people are holding a gun, they’re less capable of evaluating a threat than they would be if they didn’t have a weapon in their own hands.
The presence of a weapon can make a hostile environment more hostile.
Since 1967, researchers have been observing the “weapons effect,” a phenomenon in which the mere presence of a weapon can stimulate aggressive behavior. Of course, a person doesn’t respond to a gun the way a cartoon bull reacts to the matador’s cape; we aren’t spontaneously enraged every time we notice a firearm. But empirical research has repeatedly shown that when people are already aggravated, seeing a gun will motivate them to behave more aggressively.
Your body responds involuntarily to threats, and the presence of weapons is frequently interpreted as a superior threat in a given environment.
“The ‘threat superiority effect’ is the tendency for people to be able to pick out very quickly in their environment things that might pose a threat to their security — anything that might be dangerous,” explains Isabelle Blanchette, a professor of psychology at the University of Quebec. “People have a tendency to be able to see these things before they see other things.”
Source: http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/weblogs/politics-blog/2013/dec/19/does-the-weapons-effect-mean-open-carry-contribute/
Not bad, Stauffer, but next time spend some time disproving the allegations Salon makes instead of reporting on them.