Salon:

Imagine you’ve volunteered to participate in a study on a college campus. You arrive to find the lab somewhat cluttered: There’s a badminton racquet and some shuttlecocks on a table. The researchers tell you to ignore that stuff — it’s for a different study. They hook you up to a machine that administers electric shocks, and hand the controls to another participant like yourself. He zaps you. Repeatedly. (He’s secretly part of the research team, following specific instructions — but as far as you know he’s just being a jerk.) Now it’s your turn to zap him. How many shocks will you administer?

Leonard Berkowitz and Anthony LePage repeated this experiment with 100 male students at the University of Wisconsin, sometimes replacing the badminton equipment with a revolver and shotgun (or no stimulus at all). They found that participants administered more electric shocks when in the presence of guns. According to Berkowitz and LePage, the weapons were “aggressive cues.”

A later study at the University of Utah refined our understanding of the weapons effect. Psychologists watched the behavior of drivers stuck at an intersection behind a truck that wouldn’t budge when the light turned green. Sometimes there was a gun displayed in the truck’s rear window and sometimes there wasn’t. The researchers observed that people honked more often when they saw the gun.

Recent experiments have shown that even when nobody has been tormenting you with electric shocks or inciting your road rage, you’ll react to a gun differently than you’d react to other objects in your environment. You’ll automatically see the gun as a threat, without even realizing it.

“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.”

When I read this article I didn’t imagine at all that I volunteered for a study.  What I did imagine is a world in which psychologists have to train in something useful and worthwhile to mankind and get a real job that earns a living doing something good and productive with their time.

But it was all just a day dream.  The “threat superiority effect.”  There you have it.  I assume that there were some government dollars in their somewhere.  And that’s what you’re promulgating to the world when you openly carry a weapon.  Threat superiority.

Okay.  If they say so.