We’re seeing pretty significant poll shifts. Now, we’ve done OK during periods where the numbers were this bad. Interesting to note that 50% think it wouldn’t have helped, but we should do it anyway.
UPDATE: People are informing me this is a rather old poll in what is a very dynamic situation. We’ll see what happens over the long haul.
The devil is in the detail of these polls. I put little faith in media polls that have a sample size of 620 and claim a +/- 4 accuracy.
Sample size of 620 is the first thing I noticed as well. What a joke.
Oh, the poll was also taken just after the CT incident – when emotion was running high. There are other more recent polls showing the bounce is over for the gun grabbers.
I was worried that this was a newer poll. The number always bounces in the immediate aftermath of a media frenzy. If the next poll comes out with momentum continuing in the anti-gun direction, then I’ll be truly scared. I think a reversion toward the mean is far more likely.
I agree with @MatthewH1|| on your twitter feed– this is just a CBS poll. HOWEVER (and there is ALWAYS a “however”) I think it proves something that most of us have been suspecting all along: That the main-stream media still has a lot of influence of how the average person thinks about gun rights. If John Q. isn’t a gun owner, but hears Carolyn McShoulderthy screaming on the 5 O’Clock News that mass murders can ‘buy their automatic assault rifles with high-capacity assault clips and shoulder things that go up’ with no corrective statement, he believes it to be true. So when the CBS pollster calls, he is aghast that a mentally ill person could have a .50BMG assault clip shoulder thingy gun shipped to his house and shoot down airplanes. So, yes, Mr. Pollster, we definitely need stricter gun laws. Even though I don’t know what we have now. Clearly, it’s not enough.
Social media and the Internet are saving our rights. Just my opinion; I could be wrong.
If you use a poll to support gun control than you also believe that the South should’ve been able to keep thier slaves after the civil war. Rights are not subject to popularity contests.
You know, this was in my tabs, and I just cleared them. Yeah, it may be old. I sometimes will see old stories again for the first time when I go through my tabs, that I missed on a previous clearing, and I think it’s new.
Errr, are you being a Eeyore? E.g. shouldn’t you triple check this sort of negative news before you publish it on your very influential blog? Beside the potential of “crying wolf” desensitization (hey, you don’t want to emulate the GOA do you? :-), we don’t need bogus discouragement right now.
It’s not recommended to try to get inside someone’s head from a distance, but is your Sturm und Drang (if not quite Götterdämmerung) attitude towards our current travails resulting in some low level confirmation bias?
I don’t get paid for this. I do get paid for an actual job which has been suffering because of the volume if news. So yeah, I should have checked. But I’m not perfect, and I honestly don’t get paid enough for this blog to be a total perfectionist like I am with most other things.
Don’t move the goalposts, I’m not asking you to be a “total perfectionist”, just to do extra checking on really discouraging stuff, this old poll being a perfect example.
A simple rule that if it’s demoralizing, double check.
For a counterexample, a bill moving through the legislative process is not demoralizing (or rather you shouldn’t worry about the people who will feel it), it’s a call to action.
(The whining is also unbecoming, that’s never an excuse for getting things wrong and you’re hardly the only one who’s letting important Real Life stuff suffer in favor of this fight.)
Pay me a salary for it, and we’ll talk. Until then, I will occasionally make mistakes.
I’d also note I updated the post to note that it was an old poll, and that the situation is dynamic. I will correct errors when I make them, and note them. But perfection is not an attainable standard. I get very annoyed when told how to run things here. I don’t get paid for this.
I’ll side with Sebastian here. We humans make mistakes all the time, even when we’re getting paid, and even when it’s important. As errors go, this wasn’t very important.
I know I have a reputation for being a cynic, but frankly I prefer errors on the side of negativity to having happy-smoke blown up our tailpipes all the time. I’m not sure it’s a good example, because I don’t know that it made a lot of difference, but I remember all of the pre-election optimism about how the Democrats were de-energized and dispirited, blah-blah-blah, and how Romney’s NRA endorsement and the gun owner vote were going to provide a landslide for the Republicans. It appeared most people believed it. I don’t know if any gun owners didn’t go to the polls because they thought the election was all sewn up, but if they didn’t, it’s an example of what can happen. The fable is about the tortoise and the too-optimistic hare, not about a tortoise who didn’t run the race because odds-makers were saying he didn’t have a chance.
We appreciate all that you guys do. Thanks a zillion.
Sebastian, you do a fabulous job with this blog. You coverage of the issues is outstanding and your coverage of the PA issues is second to none.
This poll was useful and relevant, it shows how little the bump was and will show how the bump fades when the facts keep being revealed.
I’d rather him publish something and be wrong than not publish something and we miss it.
He does a good job, and if you haven’t noticed he’s published a bazillion articles in the past two weeks. He’s not perfect.
There was a more recent rasmussen or AP Poll which was far better and one I trust more. I am not sure CBS is the org I would want to trust wrt polling.
This poll is useless because there’s always support for “stricter gun laws”. That’s in part because most people have no idea what’s already on the books and being enforced, and then there’s the flat out lies that our enemies say like the NRA, which loves the NICS, doesn’t want any restrictions on sales.
When you get to specifics things change. Maybe not enough to save us from a magazine length ban (but then the Republican Party will be dead to me), but they do change. I’m sure many of the Congresscritters who had to spend more time with their families after voting for Clinton’s AW ban were initially comforted by such polls….
Meh. Wasn’t there a Congressthing that made a gun-grabby remark and then reversed himself in just a couple of days? The press and the advocates for tyranny are being noisy and monopolizing the news, but the pols are hearing from the rest of us.
It might get Piers Morgan some free drinks from his fellow journalists to call liberty advocates “stupid”, but it also gets the NRA a few thousand new members and Congressthings a few hundred more phone calls.
This was a phone in poll? lol, not to be trusted. Headline should read “Bloomberg employees take poll and find that most support gun control”
I’ll trust Gallop polls, maybe, but this biased media crap taking a poll by phone…no way.
The Gallup polls taken a week after Newtown showed there wasn’t much change. You even cited it on this blog.
Yeah, I didn’t catch that it was an old poll.
No worries man. Your still our hero. Just never scare the shit out of me like that again. I live in Illinois, were on edge as it is. ;-)