Much is being made of this poll, showing 55% of Arizonans want gun laws to be more strict. Any time you see someone touting a poll, you have to look at specifics, because in most cases someone is trying to pull a fast one. The question in question is the following:
In general do you think Arizona should have stricter laws concerning who can buy guns or not?
That’s pretty non-specific, so the polling results aren’t something I’d worry about regardless. It’s not a loaded question, like the one’s MAIG asks, but it’s pretty non-specific. Crosstabs also show that 81% of Democrats answering in the affirmative is what drove the majority results. Republicans flipped, with 55% opposing, and support among independents did not top 50%.
Also, I note the poll would seem to have oversampled women. Women were 55% of this survey, whereas census shows that Arizona is a hair under 50% on women. Women may be overrepresented on voter roles, however. But in the crosstabs, women were more likely to support gun control than men by a fairly wide margin. Support among men was only 43% with 50% opposing, whereas 65% of women support and 28% do not.
But the point is, look carefully at poll results. I would also note the margin of error here is +/- 4%.
The real problem with these polls is most of the people who support stricter gun laws have no idea what the current laws are. Somewhere online there’s a great quiz that asks if you support instituting this or that gun law. The punchline is all of them already exist.
The sample size is pretty small too. They sampled 599 people, so using the 2009 est. population of AZ that is 1 survey respondent per 11011 people in the population. These numbers mean that there is statistically only a 95% confidence in the results, with a margin of error of +-4%. It looks like the surveyors did the very bare minimum to get a result they liked. They also didn’t mention how the sample was chosen.
Before this idiot in Tucson went even more nuts, we had two straight years of the media telling us “Oh noes!!1!!! Guns in bars will mean more shootouts in the streets!!” and “Oh noes!!1!!! Permit-free concealed carry will mean more shootouts in the streets!!”, so it doesn’t surprise me that the public at large that feeds upon such crap thinks our laws are too lenient.
The fact that neither of horrible scenarios has happened. Why believe your own eyes when you have the media to tell you what is real and what is not?
What Jeff said.
I’d love to know what happened to those numbers if you took the same people, told them exactly what the existing limitations and bans were, and asked them again…
I think support would only drop :)