In the endless quest to locate ‘responsible’ gun owners who will support ‘reasonable’ gun restrictions, Gun-control Nation has just been given a new road map courtesy of the gun-control research group at Johns Hopkins, who have released their third national survey comparing the attitudes of gun owners to non-gun owners regarding different laws and policies for regulating guns. I notice in all these surveys, by the way, that gun-control advocates and organizations never find it necessary to look for ‘responsible’ folks on their side of the argument, the assumption being that anyone who wants to reduce gun violence is, by definition, a responsible and reasonable sort.
That being said, the Hopkins survey asked the two groups of respondents how they felt about 24 different gun-control policies, setting as an agreement – disagreement baseline between the two groups of 10% or more. In other words, if 75% of Gun-control Nation supports a certain policy but only 65% of Gun-nut Nation supports the same idea, the survey authors pronounce such a gap to mean that the two sides don’t agree. Fair enough.
The publication of this survey was greeted by huzzahs on the gun-control side because universal background checks, Gun-control Nation’s most endearing policy change, was supported by both groups to the tune of 85.3 percent for gun owners versus 88.7 for non-gun owners, basically a dead heat. There were also significant and high rates of agreement for yanking licenses from ‘bad apple’ dealers, mandated proficiency testing prior to issuance of a concealed-carry license and tightening up reportage to NICS of individuals who are nut jobs either because they have been stuck away in a loony bin or some judge said they don’t know their right minds.
What I found most interesting about this survey was that of the 24 policies which respondents were asked to support or not support, only one of these policies was something that Gun-nut Nation has been trying to achieve; i.e., allowing legally armed citizens to bring a concealed weapon (CCW) into a public school. Not surprisingly, at least not to my surprise, this was the one policy in which the gun owners showed themselves to be more strongly supportive than non-gun owners, the gap being 42% to 20%.
The survey is described as an effort to determine public support for ‘gun violence prevention policies,’ but excepting the policy that would allow CCW access in schools, every one of the other 23 policies happen to be policies that will reduce gun violence as defined not by the general public, but by a slice of the general public, otherwise known as the advocates and researchers in favor of gun control.
This may come as a great shock to my friends at Johns Hopkins and other academic centers where gun violence is studied as a public health risk, but there happens to be large numbers of Americans who do not necessarily subscribe to the ideas proposed by Gun-control Nation to reduce the carnage caused by guns. The fact is that a majority of Americans, contrary to the standard mantra of the gun-control movement, actually believe that a gun around the home is a benefit rather than a risk. And I guarantee you that if a ‘nationally representative’ survey asked gun owners and non-gun owners how they feel about such gun-violence reduction strategies as a national, concealed-carry license or ‘constitutional’ carry, the gun-owning respondents would support these ideas with the same degree of fervor and unquestioned belief that gun-control advocates embrace comprehensive background checks.
A survey which tests attitudes of gun owners and non-gun owners based almost entirely on gun-control policies dreamed up by one side in the debate is a survey whose results are nothing more than whole cloth. And worse, such a survey creates false expectations about the degree to which gun-control advocates will be joined by a broad swath of ‘responsible’ gun owners in the effort to strengthen gun-control laws.
There may be some gun-control scholars who define their role as shaping false beliefs. This scholar, for one, doesn’t agree.
May 22, 2018 @ 11:45:35
Confirmation bias in action, I suppose. I’m a little disappointed by the Hopkins folks.
May 22, 2018 @ 12:06:37
Left a comment on the Hopkins site after reading the AJPH paper.
All but one of those proposals were from the gun control side and look like they could have been written by Everytown for Gun Safety. No surprise, I suppose, since Mr. Bloomberg has his name on the Hopkins organization.
I’m also curious as to how the respondents were screened, i.e., are the “gun” people those who simply have a gun in the house (or not), members of a gunsport community (or not) or a gun club (or not). How serious about guns are the respondents who said they owned guns? Likewise, what were the political proclivities of the respondents who don’t own guns? One could likewise poll bicyclists about bicycle policies and get almost any answer you want depending on who answers the call.
It seems the researchers did not seriously reach out to the pro-gun side to include more than one proposal, i.e., to allow school staff who are CHL holders to bring weapons to K-12. Bad case of confirmation bias here in terms of discriminating what might be important to the public rather than the authors.