When You’re Holding a Gun, Everything Looks Like a Target

When it comes to the gun debate in America, I’m constantly swayed by the same logic often used when video games are linked to violence: the old mantra that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I’ve shot a gun before, and I really liked it. There’s something about the kickback of gunpowder that will give your adrenaline a jolt. However, I was never tempted to buy a gun to arm myself, mostly because I was afraid of how carrying a gun would change my perception of my surroundings.

And it turns out, there’s some truth to this idea. From a human standpoint, it turns out we do change our perception of our world based on our tools and resources. As Alexis Madrigal noted in an essay on guns and consciousness, historians often mark the emergence of the railroad as a key factor that re-calibrated our perception of landscape. “What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quiet familiar in the rapid movement of the railroad car,” Ralph Waldo Emmerson once wrote. We can even think back to Abraham Kaplan’s popularly paraphrased idiom, The Law of the Instrument, or in other words, if you give a persona hammer, everything looks like a nail.

New research, to be published in an upcoming issue of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Perception and Performance, by Notre Dame Associate Professor of Psychology James Brockmole and a colleague from Purdue University states that wielding a gun may increase a person’s bias to seeing guns in the hands of others, and alter our consciousness of how we see our environment.

“Beliefs, expectations, and emotions can all influence an observer’s ability to detect and to categorize objects as guns,” Dr. Brockmole says. “Now we know that a person’s ability to act in certain ways can bias their recognition of objects as well, and in dramatic ways. It seems that people have a hard time separating their thoughts about what they perceive and their thoughts about how they can or should act.”

Read the rest at Motherboard.VICE.com