A recent article of mine referred to the fact that blacks are less likely to be good shots than whites, at least in part for cultural reasons. (The exceptions tend to be those who have military training.) This is supposed to be racist for me to say, but what if it's said by employment lawyers representing affirmative action cases?

This is from Walter Olson's 1997 book The Excuse Factory: How Employment Law is Paralyzing the American Workplace

Cops without the physical ability to catch or subdue suspects by force, of course, might have to resort to using their guns—assuming they could land a hit, that is. Some New York City officers were found to lack the hand strength to pull the trigger of their standard-issue revolvers. And after lawyers argued women and minorities might lack the familiarity with firearms allegedly typical of white male recruits, Pittsburgh agreed to give more tries to those who failed a silhouette target test, thereby establishing bad aim as another legally protected category.(Page 185 )

He footnoted it to a report by the late Daniel Seligman:

(FORTUNE Magazine) – Ten police recruits who were dismissed from Pittsburgh's Public Safety Training Academy for failing a firearms test will be retrained and retested under a tentative agreement struck yesterday. Attorneys for the city and the recruits said the agreement will allow the 10 — four white women, four black women, and two black men — to continue training. The recruits were dismissed earlier this month after they failed to score the minimum 75%. on the firearms test, which involved shooting at silhouette targets. Paul D. Boas, attorney for the recruits, had argued that because they were either blacks or women, their dismissals constituted race and sex discrimination. Boas said the recruits were disadvantaged because white men generally have more experience with firearms. — From a news report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

 

Target practice in Pittsburgh. ONLY IN AMERICA (Cont'd), FORTUNE Magazine, By DANIEL SELIGMAN, July 4, 1988

This is one more example of the craziness of "disparate impact" thinking,  the theory of which, as I've said before, is that "if minorities fail tests at a higher rate than whites, it's the test that's wrong.”"