A question about firearms research

I

Ike666

New member
I am a shooter and a gun owner and have been for fifty years. I don’t hunt anymore, but shoot between 3000 and 6000 rounds a year – mostly at paper and steel. I used to shoot in USPSA and IDPA competitions, but don’t do that anymore either. I own and shoot pistols, revolvers, rifles, and shotguns.

I am also a professor of criminal justice and am engaged in research on gun ownership, and specifically on the volume of firearms transactions. My tentative conclusion is that the overall volume of firearms sales has been steadily increasing since October of 2004. There were dramatic increases in July of 2008 through the end of the year, then a dip. Recently, there seems to be another surge in firearms transactions.

I tell you these things because I really do not have an axe to grind. I am a behavioral research scientist and legitimately interested in whatever answer my question below may generate. It is not part of a research study, nor will any data be collected from this inquiry. It is a discussion topic I want to introduce.

One of the puzzling pieces of data is that the apparent ownership rate is decreasing in the United States. Ownership rate is the proportion of the population that owns a firearm. This information comes primarily from a survey conducted regularly by the National Opinion Research Center called the General Social Survey.

My question to the members of this forum is, would you misrepresent your firearms ownership to an interviewer from the General Social Survey?
 
My question to the members of this forum is, would you misrepresent your firearms ownership to an interviewer from the General Social Survey?
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Absolutely, if I answered at all. It seems (or appears?) to me that all polls or surveys have an agenda that is FAR outside the scope of simply learning and gathering data. Typically, a survey is a canned line of questions written in a particular way to hopefully elicit a particular response. That data is often gathered and disseminated as "real data" or "scientific proof." Much like the census, many of the pro-gun type folks don't believe that it's anyone's business and that any "data" gathered from such polling is going to be used in a negative manner at the very least.
One of the puzzling pieces of data is that the apparent ownership rate is decreasing in the United States. Ownership rate is the proportion of the population that owns a firearm.
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I would say that this directly relates to human aging. More men from an earlier era, (one in which personal firearms ownership played a larger & more common role) are growing older and passing on. Right now we are experiencing a boom in new folks who are seeking out firearms, but we have recently come through a decades-long anti-gun campaign that did quite a job to put owning and shooting firearms outside of the main stream.
 
My question to the members of this forum is, would you misrepresent your firearms ownership to an interviewer from the General Social Survey?
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Firearms? What firearms?

In other words, it’s no one’s business if I own firearms or not.
 
I would be quite concerned about answering any questions related to my ownership, possession, transport, or use of firearmsn in response to a GSS survey. As I understand it (from Googling the GSS), the GSS is a program conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), and this is from their website:
NORC said:
NORC has headquarters on the University of Chicago's campus, and offices in Chicago's downtown Loop, Washington, DC, Bethesda, Maryland, and Berkeley, California, as well as a field staff that operates nationwide. . . .
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Source: http://www3.norc.org/GSS+Website/About+GSS/About+NORC/

Headquarters and 4 satellite offices in what appear some of the least 2A-friendly places in the nation*. The individual researchers themselves may or may not have axes to grind, but this makes them readily accessible to politicians who do.

*Caveat: I know less about MD's gun laws than I do the others listed, but I am under the impression that MD is not particularly supportive of the RKBA.
 
Would I misrepresent to an interviewer?

I would not be answering questions in the first place. Privacy is one concern, but mostly it's a matter of knowing that polls are nearly useless. We've known this for how many decades?

"DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN"

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The actual questions asked

To clarify, the GSS does ask some rather pointed questions about support for gun regulations and has been criticized for the wording of these questions. I am not interested in those questions. However, my interest is in the ownership questions which I think are pretty unbiased. They are:

Do you happen to have in your home (IF HOUSE: or garage) any guns or revolvers?

Do any of these guns personally belong to you?

If you are disinclined to answer such questions, I'd be interested in knowing your reasons.
 
Most gun owners, myself included, don't care for the idea that any random source is going to be told that we have firearms in our home. We greatly fear the idea that it would make us a target for theft.

We have NOTHING whatsoever to gain by answering that question with a "yes", especially when we have no idea what is done with the information, who gets that information, and how it is tied to us. Afterall, unless we came to you, why on Earth would we believe that our answers will be in strict confidence? At contact, you either have our phone number or our address.

You are seriously pushing water uphill. You aren't likely to get any answers that fit the mold of what you are hoping for... kinda like your survey.
 
You aren't likely to get any answers that fit the mold of what you are hoping for... kinda like your survey.
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Sevens, I don't have a "mold of what [I am] hoping for." It is not my survey either. It is, however, relied on by a number of government organizations in determining policy of all sort.

My questions are straight forward and without agenda - and the answers pretty much what I expected. But, frankly, if we don't ask we don't know.
 
If you are disinclined to answer such questions, I'd be interested in knowing your reasons.
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The answers are none of anyone's business but mine.

I am generally disinclined to answer ANY survey.

Even more so from a group that lives and breaths in lefty land.

I would not answer even if I received assurances of anonymity.

And with record sales (inferred from record NICS checks, let alone private sales) the idea of a decreasing number of gun owners would appear to have problems.

All the sales cannot be attributed to existing gun owners, especially in a poor economy.
 
It does seem that firearm owners are a bit suspicious of the survey. That could be a cause for dropping rate of households with firearms on the survey.

Another cause might be the decrease in the number of people living in the average American household. We seem to have hit bottom, for now, on household size. It will be interesting to see if the rate of household gun ownership begins to stabilize.
 
One of the puzzling pieces of data is that the apparent ownership rate is decreasing in the United States. Ownership rate is the proportion of the population that owns a firearm. This information comes primarily from a survey conducted regularly by the National Opinion Research Center called the General Social Survey.
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Is this the one you're referring to? The name on the masthead is very familiar to some of us.

The result directly conflicts with numerous industry and lay surveys (including Gallup) that show dramatic increases in gun ownership over the last decade.

My question to the members of this forum is, would you misrepresent your firearms ownership to an interviewer from the General Social Survey?
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My understanding of the GSS is that it's conducted through face-to-face interviews. So, even if I consented to one in the first place, I'd not be admitting gun ownership.

One of the factors that made Gary Kleck's studies during the Carter administration so effective was that they were anonymous and conducted via telephone. Gun owners felt more comfortable opening up to the interviewer.
 
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I too shy away from polls. I don't think I would answer any such question on guns in my home, it's nobody's buisness.
 
if I remained anonymous I wouldn't misrepresent any info. if I did then why take the survey in the first place
 
Maybe you haven't noticed, but there is an ever-increasing lack of trust of politicians and the government, and gun owners are at least as susceptible to that as anyone else is. It's hard to trust an authority figure (who may as well be wearing a name tag reading "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you") when you can't watch or listen to the news without having one or other of these weasels lie to us to our faces. Here in Canada, we just wasted 2 billion dollars on a gun registry that is estimated to have actually registered maybe 65% of the guns that are actually in Canada, and I think a similar effort in the US would be much less successful.
 
"there is an ever-increasing lack of trust of politicians and the government"

I'm always surprised by this; surprised by the idea that anybody trusts the government. Both sides of my family have been generally distrustful since they came over from Scotland and Ireland in the early 1700s.

And strangers asking questions? They're probably working for the government or on the payroll. :)
 
@Tom Servo

Actually the VPC report is based on an analysis of data collected by the GSS, so both Tom & 2damnold4this are correct. (This data is made available to all researchers after it is collected. We are free to conduct our own analysis and make our own interpretation of that analysis.)

In fact, it was the VPC report that sparked a discussion between my research partner and me. It was contrary to what we were discovering with out analysis of the NICS data. The GSS percentage of gun owners has been trending down steadily for a while now, but this seems a contrarian phenomenon - many other indicators suggest that ownership is increasing (e.g. NSSF data - not readily available to others).

The simple truth is - we don't know. My co-investigator and I both suspected that gun owners, in general, would be unlikely to report on the true nature of their ownership. Gary Kleck was certainly in the right place at the right time with his ownership survey, but the information is extremely dated now.

BTW, the GSS is conducted both by in-person interviews and telephone interviews. It is a "rolling panel" design with a complete set of data collected every year. One cycle, those in the panel, are interviewed by a live interviewer and the next by telephone. Actual data collection is done in two six month cycles.

The survey also asks about other sensitive social topics: sex, religion, politics. But, responses to the gun ownership questions seem to be unique.

I appreciate everyone weighing in on this.
 
The simple truth is - we don't know.
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I'm not a sociologist, but I dated one for a few weeks. Then she left me for a guy with a nose ring who "gets Phillip Glass." Nonetheless, I think I can spot a discrepancy here.

In one corner, we have a survey, in which people might be inclined to give false or incomplete answers.

In the other corner, we've got conflicting statistical data. Consider the NICS statistics for background checks. Over 14,000,000 checks were performed in 2010. That number doesn't include sales that didn't require background checks, such as those that take place in states where carry permits exempt buyers from the process. The real number of firearms purchased is likely much more than that.

That number has been trending steadily up since 2005, and it's certainly outpacing inflation growth. Unless people are losing or destroying massive amounts of guns, I can't reconcile that with the results of the GSS survey.
 
Increasing gun sales, in and of themselves, don't imply more widespread gun ownership. You have to know if the increase is due to gun owners purchasing additional guns or if the increase is due to non-gun owners buying their first guns.

If it's exclusively the former then it's not changing the gun ownership stats at all--it's actually resulting in a decrease given that the population is increasing. If it's exclusively the latter then it's probably changing them a great deal assuming that it's outpacing the population increase.

It's obviously some combination of the two, but without knowing the mix, it's not possible to use the NICS stats to answer the question.
 
I do get a kick out of surveys....

Or, more specifically, the fact that so many, otherwise "intelligent" people actually believe that the data accurately represents facts, and the things they use the data to justify....

Take, for instance, the surveys they conduct in schools, and then report on the sexual, drinking, and drug use of the kids. I know its been a long, long time since I was that age, but some things don't change that much, I think.

And one of them is that teenage boys will lie their heads off to an anynomous survey, just to screw with it. OF course, many will tell the truth, but many will also say they are having sex 8 times a week when they aren't having any at all.

Would I tell a survey I have guns? Don't think so. After all, why should I trust you? You might be a smart burgular checking out my place to see if I would tell you I had something worthwhile.

Or, you might be connected with some anti gun group, or even terrorists. You call me out of nowhere, and ask if I own guns? Sorry, you don't even get the time of day from me.

I knew a fella, old farmer, somehow, he got on a pollster's list, back during the Clinton administration. Every couple months, they would call him, and ask some questions, including how satisfied he was with the president.

Now, he was basically an apolitical kind of guy, didn't really care much about it, so he would always answer that he thought the president was ok. After a few years of this, he decided to see what would happen if he told them he was dissatisified with the president. The next time they called him, he did.

And, you know what? They never called him again!
 
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