One of the things I do here at work is run what is usually called “diversity training”, which generally means I get to tell a lot of people stuff they should already know.

Part of what I do in the class involves showing a video that is actually a series of black and white still photographs of people in various situations. The trainees record their reactions to the photographs so that we can then explore how subconscious stereotyping affects our perceptions.

They then see the photographs again; many of them have been cropped, so they get more information in the second go-round when they see the full image.

One of the photographs is of a white guy in a leather biker jacket, headband, longhair, mustache, unsmiling, clutching a length of chrome pipe in both hands.

During the discussion today, someone mentioned a photograph that had a guy holding “a gun”. (For the record, there is no gun in any photograph.)

I was confused. “Which one did you mean?” I asked. “You know, the one with the gun.”

Then someone else chimed in. “He means the first one — you know, where the guy was holding the pool cue.”

In a few minutes, I had people telling me about the “pool cue”, the “lead pipe”, the “crowbar”, and a couple more who insisted it was “a gun” in the biker’s hands.

They were all pretty shocked to discover that the uncropped photograph showed the guy holding the handle to a baby carriage.

Now, I know this is a staged setting, but it struck me how every image these good, thoughtful folks conjured up involved something that is typically associated with a use as a weapon.

And I wish I could tell you it was the first time it had happened. It wasn’t. It happens all the time. Almost every time, in fact, someone (and usually more than one) will identify that chrome tube as a deadly weapon of some sort. This was just the first time the word “gun” had come up.

If you see a threat, the threat will be there.

And it makes me shudder to think of how many more people will be shot — in our cities, in Iraq and Haiti, and who knows where else around this world — because people will see the threats they’ve been conditioned to see.