An anthropology professor at Dartmouth College, Chelsey Kivland, claimed that magic could influence people to use guns to kill other people. Kivland studies “street politics, insecurity, and social performance in contemporary urban Haiti” at Dartmouth and said the following about magic and guns:
“It would be shortsighted to dismiss these claims as the misguided logic of a ‘superstitious people…That racially inflected trope, long used to marginalize and demonize Haitians, among others, blinds observers to the way in which guns do exhibit a power akin to magic: the power to create a change in someone’s state of mind.”
