This is my first GSS post. This website, which was supposed to have an easy to use interface, wasn’t working. So I used this.
At Steve Sailer’s, a commenter going by the name “testing99” that seems like he’s trying to replace a previous visitor called “Evil Neocon” made the claim “Blacks don’t want gun control either, the last thing they’d want is for their militias er … Gangs to be disarmed. That’s what keeps them from being ethnically cleansed by Latino Gangs or gentrification yuppies”. That seemed like data-free assertion, so I decided to check it. I ran the question GUNLAW in the 2006 GSS against race. The question asks “Would you favor or oppose a law which would require a person to obtain a police permit before he or she could buy a gun?”.
As you can see, blacks are more in favor of this gun-control law than whites. My guess is that blacks tend to live in urban neighborhoods with high-crime rates and associate guns with gang violence. Whites tend to live in areas with lower crime rates and more hunting. They probably associate anti-gun types with anti-hunting and PETA folks. Guns are also rather traditional for many whites, whereas blacks were prohibited from owning them. In many European countries only the nobility was able to hunt and generally restricted the ability of the lower classes to own weapons. These same countries tend to be more densely populated and urban today and they also have more gun control.
UPDATED March 26 2011: For search purposes I should mention that testing99 later changed his handle to “Whiskey” and started a blog under that name. And if someone could tell me how to make my wordpress.com search with a logical “OR” or other tricks, I would appreciate it.

April 14, 2008 at 10:55 pm
I’ve seen this with the drug legalization question too. Blacks appear relatively less in favor.
April 15, 2008 at 12:07 am
I frequently hear from libertarians like Stefan Molyneux that the underclass must have libertarian instincts because they get screwed over by the state. However, the state screws everyone over, and if people reacted in a politically rational manner those policies wouldn’t have so much support. But they do.
April 15, 2008 at 11:32 am
My experience is that blacks frequently believe that drugs and guns have been forced on them by elites in order to addict blacks to drugs, send them to jail, or have them kill each other. In other words, the existence of drugs and guns is part of an elite white conspiracy for subjugation. From this perspective, there’s a certain logic to the prohibitionist mentality. Gun laws and drug laws might be seen as a barrier to ruling class ambitions (the same way social democrats see the regulatory welfare state).
There’s a lot of schizophrenic thinking on these issues among blacks. Some will lament the huge numbers of blacks prison, viewing it as a racist conspiracy, but then turn around and voice support for the laws that are putting them there. It’s also true that a lot of black leaders like to use drugs and guns as scapegoats. There’s also a lot of rank hypocrisy. The late columnist Carl Rowan, for instance, was a diehard gun controller-until he got arrested for shooting someone with an illegal firearm. Some black nationalist types will pose as staunch drug warriors while simultaneously demanding amnesty for black prisoners.
The way to reach black Americans on these issues is to continually emphasize that the rates of crime, imprisonment and police brutality should all go down in black communities with the absence of such laws.
April 15, 2008 at 1:01 pm
In a way they are right that white elites have caused many of these things. It’s just more the result of idiocy (or perhaps an emergent strategy of the state to expand and create problems that justify its intervention) than a conspiracy.
It’s not just blacks that seem schizophrenic. At Philip Converse noted, the average person does not have an ideology or understand what one is and their statements on political issues are quite inconsistent.
April 18, 2008 at 10:21 pm
TTGP,
It is superobvious that testing99 is evilneocon after he took a short break after humiliating himself with more talk of a Moraccan speedboat invasion of Spain.
He’s a fun commenter to read, but really, absolutely out of touch with reality. I’m amazed that anyone bothered to investigate one of his assertions.
I commend you for your dedication to empiricism.
April 18, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Glad you like it, I hope to do more GSS posts. If you’ve got a topic you’d like me to examine, let me know.