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Socius: Sociological Research for
a Dynamic World
Volume 8: 1 –4
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Data Visualization
In the wake of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on
January 6, 2021, U.S. Senate majority leader Chuck
Schumer declared, “Those who performed these reprehen-
sible acts cannot be called protesters; no, these were rioters
and insurrectionists, goons and thugs, domestic terrorists”
(U.S. House of Representatives 2021). Even Republican
senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, a long-time
Donald Trump loyalist, proclaimed the invaders of Congress
to be “terrorists, not protesters.” Support for the January 6
uprising has also been linked in both media and scholarly
outlets to White supremacy, antigovernment sentiment, and
a passion for guns and the Second Amendment (Morabia
2021).
Although support for the events of January 6 may consti-
tute a racial “dog whistle,” how views of January 6 and Black
Lives Matter (BLM) specifically relate to each other and to
race itself is unclear. Complicating an understanding of who
supported the insurrection is the role of gun ownership, a
polarizing aspect of American life that has been cited as an
increasing form of a dog whistle (Schutten et al. 2021).
In Figure 1, we visualize these relationships using survey
data collected from May to October 2021. Our sample comes
from a follow-up of the Project on Human Development in
Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN+), a longitudinal study of
multiple birth cohorts of Chicago residents that began in the
mid-1990s and was designed to examine the social context of
human development over multiple waves of study. Respondents
were followed wherever they moved in the United States, with
about half still residents of Chicago and the vast majority liv-
ing in Illinois in 2021 (for more details on the PHDCN+, see
Sampson, Kirk, and Bucci 2022).
Given common discourse, it is perhaps surprising how
minimally views toward the Capitol insurrection vary by
race (Figure 1A). The clear majority (more than 70 percent)
view participants of the insurrection as extremists. If any-
thing, there is slightly more support among Blacks than
Whites for viewing January 6 participants as “patriots.”
However, the main story is the sheer lack of racial differ-
ences overall.
Figure 1B, by comparison, shows that racial attitudes
about BLM play a significant role, independent of race and
1110124SRDXXX10.1177/23780231221110124SociusBucci et al.
research-article2022
1Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
2Oxford University, Oxford, UK
Corresponding Author:
Robert J. Sampson, Harvard University, Department of Sociology, William
James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Email: rsampson@wjh.harvard.edu
Visualizing How Race, Support for Black
Lives Matter, and Gun Ownership Shape
Views of the U.S. Capitol Insurrection of
January 6, 2021
Rebecca Bucci1, David S. Kirk2, and Robert J. Sampson1
Abstract
Protest movements linked to racial inequality in policing and antigovernment sentiment have roiled the United States
in recent years. In this visualization, the authors examine how race, support for Black Lives Matter (BLM), and gun
ownership predict views about the political uprising of January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol. On the basis of a 2021
survey from a long-term longitudinal study, the authors show that views of the Capitol insurrection do not vary by
race, contrary to expectations. However, there is a positive association between support for BLM and views of January
6 participants as “extremists,” especially among Whites, independent of age, sex, respondent’s education, parental
education, and childhood neighborhood poverty. Race and gun ownership also interact, with White gun owners an
outlier in viewing the insurrection more favorably. Black gun owners, on the contrary, viewed it most negatively.
Keywords
race, Black Lives Matter, Capitol insurrection, guns
2 Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
Figure 1. Views on the Capitol insurrection, by race, support for BLM, and gun ownership.
Note: Visualization results are based on a fifth survey wave of the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN+) carried out
by NORC at the University of Chicago in 2021 (n = 682). The sample includes four cohorts of individuals, born in approximately 1981, 1984, 1987, and
(continued)
Bucci et al. 3
additional covariates. Overall, supporters of BLM are
approximately 1.5 times more likely to view the individuals
who stormed the Capitol as extremists than are nonsupport-
ers of BLM. This pattern persists across all racial groups.
When looking within race, however, these differences are
largest for Whites and Hispanics; White and Hispanic sup-
porters of BLM are significantly more likely (p < .01) to
view insurrection participants as extremists relative to non-
supporters within their own racial group. Among Blacks,
there is no significant difference by BLM support or nonsup-
port. There is some variation between race among nonsup-
porters of BLM, but these differences are not significant. The
similarity of attitudes toward the insurrection by race in
Figure 1A is thus driven mainly by the lack of differentiation
by race among BLM supporters, who constitute more than
70 percent of the sample.
Figure 1C shows that despite sentiment that support for the
insurrection is positively correlated with gun ownership, this
pattern persists only for White respondents in our sample.
White gun owners are significantly less likely to view January
6 participants as extremists compared with Whites who do not
own guns (p < .01). This finding contrasts with the idea of
White gun owners as “citizen protectors” and that access to
guns has effectively “deputized whites as legitimate carriers of
law and order” (Carlson 2020:14). These “carriers of law and
order” are the least likely to consider the events of January 6
as an extremist attempt to overthrow the government.
For Black respondents, the pattern is reversed, with gun
owners significantly more likely to view the January 6 par-
ticipants as extremists than non–gun owners (p < .05). This
finding stands in contrast to images of Black gun ownership
from the civil rights era, in which the Black Panthers armed
themselves in opposition to the government, specifically for
self-protection against state-sponsored violence. For
Hispanic respondents, there is virtually no difference in
views of the insurrection by gun ownership.
Future research should examine additional predictors of
support for BLM and the Capitol insurrection. Social move-
ments surrounding these issues have been some of the most
polarizing in recent history, although as we have shown, not
in the simple ways often portrayed. Additional research is
needed to explore how early life factors, including other
family and neighborhood conditions, contribute to the
development of these views through their impact on legal
cynicism, contact with the police, and exposure to different
racial groups.
Acknowledgments
The authors are listed in alphabetical order. Support for this article
was provided in part by the National Collaborative on Gun Violence
Research and the Leverhulme Trust through the Leverhulme Centre
for Demographic Science.
ORCID iDs
David S. Kirk https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0037-4291
Robert J. Sampson https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4259-8146
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
References
Carlson, Jennifer. 2020. Policing the Second Amendment: Guns,
Law Enforcement, and the Politics of Race. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Morabia, Alfredo. 2021. “The Fascist Threat.” American Journal of
Public Health 111(4):538–39.
Sampson, Robert J., David S. Kirk, and Rebecca Bucci. 2022.
“Cohort Profile: Project on Human Development in Chicago
Neighborhoods and Its Additions (PHDCN+).” Journal of
Developmental and Life-Course Criminology. https://doi.
org/10.1007/s40865-022-00203-0
Schutten, Nathaniel M., Justin T. Pickett, Alexander L. Burton,
Cheryl Lero Jonson, Francis T. Cullen, and Velmer S. Burton,
Jr., 2022. “Are Guns the New Dog Whistle? Gun Control,
Racial Resentment, and Vote Choice.” Criminology 60(1):90–
123.
U.S. House of Representatives. 2021. Congressional Record
167(4). Retrieved June 19, 2022. https://www.govinfo.gov/
app/details/CREC-2021-01-06.
Author Biographies
Rebecca Bucci is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. She
recently received her PhD in criminology at Penn State University.
Her research interests include crime, delinquency and substance
use, the life course, policing, offender decision making, and neigh-
borhood effects.
1995, who were representative of children growing up in Chicago in the mid-1990s, the baseline of the study at wave 1. All outcomes are based on the
survey question “What label do you think best characterizes the people who participated in the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to contest
the results of the presidential election?” In panel A, we report all answer options, which include “extremist,” “protester,” and “patriot.” Panel A presents
the prevalence of each response on the basis of multiply imputed (10 data sets) and survey-adjusted means for Whites (n = 143), Blacks (n = 220), and
Hispanics (n = 288). Results for respondents who identify as any other race (n = 31) were dropped from the analysis. Panels B and C present predicted
probabilities on the basis of logistic regression models that predict a collapsed outcome (extremist = 1, patriot or protester = 0), controlling for age,
sex, current education of the respondent, growing up in neighborhood poverty, and parental education. Error bars are based on survey-adjusted 95
percent confidence intervals. All data are weighted to reflect the original sampling stratification and attrition due to follow-up. For further information
on the models estimated to create the figure and further explanation of the study design, data, variables, and data availability, see the online supplemental
information and Sampson et al. (2022).
Figure 1. (continued)
4 Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World
David S. Kirk is a professor in the Department of Sociology and
Nuffield College at the University of Oxford and a faculty associate
of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. His recent
book, Home Free, uses Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment to
examine the relationship between residential environments and the
life course of crime.
Robert J. Sampson is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences
at Harvard University and principal investigator of the Project on
Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods+. His research inter-
ests include the study of crime and criminal justice contact, inequality,
neighborhood effects, and the life course. His last book is Great
American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect.
