Ah, baseball. America’s pastime. And being America’s pastime, it too has a problem with gun control and gay issues.
A survey by ESPN Magazine of 110 anonymous Major League Baseball players revealed some rather interesting facts (via BuzzFeed):
— Asked “do you know of any gay players?” only 5% (six players) said yes. “Yes, but that’s as far as I want to go, even if this is anonymous,” said one National Leaguer.
— 46% said they own a firearm — and these 51 players have a total of 258 guns. “Let me ask you something,” says one pitcher. “If you were rich and famous and your salary was in the newspaper every week, would you worry about your wife and kids? That’s why I have guns.”
So what does this mean? Probably nothing, except that the amount of gays to guns in the MLB is disturbingly disproportionate.
BJ McFrisky
Disproportionate? Um . . . maybe because there are a lot more guns in the country than there are gays? (damn that stupid common-sense math!)
alterego1980
I’m more interested in the fact that 6 players know another player that’s gay. Are these 6 players all from the same team, talking about the same player? If that’s the case, then that player is pretty much “out” to his closest teammates, which is great. If these guys are talking about different players, even better.
gattsuru
@BJ McFrisky: It’s hard to get good estimates, since gun owners have similar reporting compliance issues as gay men when it comes to surveys (and for surprisingly similar reasons). Most estimates put the number somewhere on the order of three hundred million firearms, with some tallies like FFL counts going a little lower but not much so. Gun owners tend to own more than one gun, though: a 22 pistol is great for target plinking but terrible for hunting or self-defense, a centerfire rifle is great for hunting but not something you want to fire too long at the range, concealed carry practically necessitates a centerfire handgun. Gun ownership comes somewhere one in two and one in three households, with a lot of variance depending on state and city.
Self-identifying gay men, depending on survey, come somewhere between two and ten percent of the population (Kinsey numbers reflect action, rather than identification). “People who know a gay person” is almost certainly a much larger set, and network effects should put it well over 95% for the demographic group baseball players belong to. So it probably does reflect either a profession that discourages gay folk from playing, or discourages them from coming out, or discourages others from mentioning any association.