How race, gun ownership, and Black Lives Matter shape Americans’ views of the January 6 Capitol attack

A new study finds that Americans’ perceptions of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack can be predicted by their views on social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, but not so much by one’s race or possession of a gun, except when the two are viewed together.

The new study, based on a long-term study of childhood development and life outcomes later in life, was published Friday in the journal Socius: sociological research for a dynamic world† It asked participants to label people who stormed the Capitol as “extremists,” “protesters” or “patriots.” The responses were then broken down by race and analyzed to examine how they were affected by a person’s support for BLM or if they owned a gun.

“We wanted to understand how people’s feelings about recent social movements — in this case, Black Lives Matter — and the interaction between race and gun ownership predict attitudes on Jan. 6,” said Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson, one of three co authors. on the study. “It’s really the intersection of these different things that matters in our data.”

Overall, the researchers found that views on the uprising did not differ by race. In fact, the clear majority — more than 70 percent — of white, black and Hispanic people surveyed condemned the act, labeling the rioters as extremists. Only about 20 percent labeled them protesters, while an even smaller percentage labeled them patriots, showing a shared view of the attack with very little variation.

However, the researchers began to see more nuance in associating support for Black Lives Matter and gun ownership with the likelihood that the rioters were perceived as extremists.

BLM supporters were 1.5 times more likely to label the people who stormed the Capitol as extremists than non-supporters.

The pattern persisted across all racial groups, but was especially evident among white and Hispanic respondents. For example, among white respondents, about 75 percent of BLM supporters saw those who attacked the Capitol as extremists, while only about 41 percent of non-supporters did. Hispanics included 82 percent of BLM supporters compared to nearly 58 percent of non-adherents who labeled them extremists. A similar pattern occurred among black respondents, with most describing the rioters as extremists, but there was no significant difference between BLM adherents and non-adherents labeling the rioters as extremists.

Since the attack, several media and scholarly reports have linked the Jan. 6 support to a passion for guns and the Second Amendment. Looking at gun ownership alone, the researchers found no connection between the two. It wasn’t until they linked guns to racing that they found a connection, with white gun owners as an outlier in viewing the political insurgency most beneficial.

More than 70 percent of Spanish gun owners and non-gun owners labeled January 6 as extremists, while more than 90 percent of black gun owners and nearly 75 percent of non-gun owners did the same. White gun owners were significantly less likely to label Jan. 6 participants as extremists than white respondents who didn’t own a gun — about 42 percent compared to 66 percent.

“Until you break it down by race, you’re really not telling the whole story or the right story,” said Rebecca Bucci, a Harvard postdoctoral researcher who works with Sampson.

Study participants were enrolled in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, a longitudinal study of multiple birth cohorts that began in the mid-1990s.

Nearly 700 participants responded, consisting of individuals born in 1981, 1984, 1987, and 1995. One hundred and forty-three respondents were white, 220 were black, and 288 were Hispanic. Respondents who identified as a different race were removed from the survey. The researchers controlled for age, gender, current education, growing up in poverty and parental upbringing.

The study pointed to potential caveats, such as the fact that the study is limited to people who are originally from Chicago and that it’s a relatively small sample size.

The study marks the authors’ first attempt to provide a descriptive portrait of positions on Jan. 6 and to explore common assumptions about how race, views on racial issues and gun ownership relate to support for the attack. The researchers say more research is needed to assess additional sources of beliefs about the Capitol attack and how early life factors contribute to the development of these beliefs in general.

“Ultimately, we want to try to understand how different groups somehow come to their feelings about government and the law,” said David S. Kirk, a sociologist from the University of Oxford and the third co-author on the study. “How do these views evolve over time…. This is a first stage where we’re trying to unpack that.”