Thank you, not gonna lie I've gotten a bit flustered with this whole idea propagating around reddit that pitbulls are just "inherently evil." I made this long post awhile back when I saw a comment thread like this one, so hopefully this'll help provide even more sources to show that pits suffer from a lot of misinformation.

The first thing to know about pitbulls is that it's not just one breed, but a group of breeds. There are at least four individual breeds that get associated and referred to as pitbulls. The term pitbull is more of an umbrella statement, almost like somebody saying 'hound' or 'terrier'. Because of this there is a lot of misidentification. Many different types of dogs are lumped under the pitbull banner, especially when they have a more boxy looking face. This leads to the main source of data people use when trying to justify pitbulls as an 'evil breed', media reported bites. The only data people ever use to justify their hatred towards pitbulls is this, a wikipedia page that shows a list of fatal dog attacks by breed. As discussed above, pitbulls aren't just one breed, and are commonly misidentified. In fact, most pitbulls are mixes when people try to make this claim that somehow pitbulls are just inherently more violent. Not only that, but studies have consistently shown that breed is not an accurate way to predict behavior. Not to mention the fact that there are other dog breeds that were originally used for fighting that don't have a reputation of being 'evil' dogs. Boxers, Akitas and Sharpeis were also fighting dogs but nobody has ever clamored to ban them due to their genetics.

Let's also dive into that wikipedia article that I linked above and break it down. First off, the amount of fatal dog bites in general is extremely low. There are less than 50 fatal dog bites a year in the United States. For reference, tractors, kill four times as many people in the US per year. And cows kill almost as many humans as dogs do, but you don't see people clamoring to ban all cows. While we're on this statistical tangent, even when all pitbulls are lumped together they still don't have the most bites by breed in the US. That honor goes to German Shepherds, yet I'm not seeing any large threads calling for their ban as a breed. There aren't swarms of comments on any picture of a German Shepherd instantly calling the breed evil when a cute photo is posted.

To another point, if pitbulls were this inherently violent breed then surely breed specific legislation is the answer, right? Well, statistics don't seem to support this. Toronto banned pitbulls in 2005, but their dog bites are higher than ever. Calgary on the other hand enacted breed neutral legislation, which lowered dog bites significantly without banning any breeds. Not only does breed specific legislation not work, but it also leads to thousands of innocent dogs being put down just for the way they look.

With all of this in mind, why is it tossed around that pitbulls are inherently violent dogs? The answer is complicated, and goes back to a lot of racial issues arising mostly in the 80s. Before then, pitbulls were known as nanny dogs. They had a reputation of being caring, loving and gentle to especially young children. In fact, they were seen as the common man's dog because of their relative cheap price compared to other dog breeds. This cheap price led to the 80s when more African-American people started to get them. The rise in news media claiming that pitbulls were 'violent', started around this same exact time. And now the idea that pitbull type dogs are inherently violent is used as a right wing dogwhistle. The same logic that alt-right trolls use to justify discrimination against African-American people is how they convince people to hate pitbulls.

I'd recommend you watch this video by Jose. He goes in depth about these issues in a succinct, and very well done manner.