Firearm owner survey

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zagbomb

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Hello,

My name is Andrew and I am a fellow firearm owner looking for some feedback on attitudes and opinions of other firearms owners in the Midwest. I am a University of Wisconsin graduate student and I have organized a series of questions in a form of an online survey that I would appreciate your input on. This questionnaire consists of 31 questions or less and it will only take about 10 minutes to complete. Please remember that all responses will remain strictly confidential. Feel free to share the link with any other individuals that are firearms owners, hobbyists and/or collectors. Thank you for your help on this project. The survey is only valid until 3/24/2017.

https://uweauclaire.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_5sUg06leUinwxZb

Remember the survey is 100% voluntary.
I do not collect any personal identifying data outside of our demographic questions and each response is 100% confidential.
I am not a business and I am not selling or advertising anything. I am merely collecting data for analysis for a project management course. The "product" that I am inquiring your opinion on is 100% hypothetical.
There are two ranking questions that can be confusing at first. All you have to do is click and drag each option to the order that you want.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to ask me and I will try to respond as quickly as I can. After 3/24 the survey is not long valid and will no longer be available to take.

I really appreciate your time and consideration in helping me with this project.

Thanks,

Andrew
 
I'm up to question number three and I already have a problem with the survey.

Zagbomb, are you currently a firearms owner? The question on types of firearms owned or contemplated includes "assault rifle." Many of us on this and other "gun" forums consider the term "assault weapon" to be an artificial term created by anti-gun activists to confuse people who don't know much about guns. An "assault rifle" is a military rifle capable of firing in full-automatic mode (i.e. submachine gun), or in three-round burst mode. Civilians are not (in general) allowed to buy such firearms, they are what the Army and the Marines use. In general, ordinary civilians can buy what many states have labeled as "assault weapons." In general, ordinary civilians canNOT buy "assault rifles" without jumping through a lot of additional hoops and paying a special tax fee.

So ... is your question really asking if we own a full-automatic military assault rifle (such as an M16 or M4 carbine), or are you asking about civilian rifles that look like the real thing but only fire in semi-automatic mode (i.e. the AR-15)?

Since I can't answer this question, I am suspending my participation in the quiz.
 
I made it almost as far as Aquila Blanca did, but am also suspending my participation.

My problem is Question #2: "How many firearms do you have in your household?" If you want to know my attitudes, fine. I'll answer those kinds of questions. How many I own? You don't need to know that for me to explain my attitudes, though. And honestly, I saw another question further down about what brands I own. Why do you need to know that?

I'm afraid that you may find that gun owners are not always the most forthcoming lot. Somewhere between being fairly security/preparedness conscious to begin with, coupled with ~30 years of being harangued and maligned by anti-gun politicians, a lot of us have learned to keep our heads down quite well.
 
Thank you for your questions.

Yes when I wrote Assault rifle I was referring to the AR that civilians can purchase. However, I did not want to limit the response so that if a person did own a military weapon, they could also respond accordingly. It is just a general question so I can generalize the controlled responses to a target market. So if 15% responded that they did own an "assault rifle," I could rationalize my marketing accordingly. Does that make sense. I really less concerned with who owns what and more concerned with what is the general % that owns a handgun, rifle, or any other firearm type. If you don't want to answer that question you don't have to and it should allow you to continue without answering.

In terms of the household questions. Again, I am not concerned with anyone's specific choices in particular. However, if a majority of firearms owners own more than 1 or 5 than I can plan accordingly and make education decisions for the business process, such as how reasonable is it focus on offering products that will be utilized my multiple firearms. If a majority only own 1 firearm, why would I market assuming people have more than 1. You can also skip that question if you prefer.

Again, these are 100% confidential and no data will be used outside of this hypothetical project.

Thanks!
 
Additionally, for further clarification. Once the survey is submitted, each survey is merely labeled with a date and time that it was completed. There is no way to tell who took said survey outside of the basic demographic data. The collection process is designed so that I can apply it to a larger demographic based on the assumptions you give me. I don't want individual qualitative data as this does not allow me to generalize. So honestly, I don't care what your individual responses are, I only care as a whole what the data tells me.

Please feel free to post further questions. You can complete as much or as little of the survey you wish. I appreciate it all the same.

Andrew
 
zagbomb wrote:

Additionally, for further clarification. Once the survey is submitted, each survey is merely labeled with a date and time that it was completed. There is no way to tell who took said survey outside of the basic demographic data.
Click to expand...

Having worked in the survey industry and related for nigh on 20 years even the cheapish crappy internet survey software we used 20 years ago had the ability to capture the IP address of the responding computer. Maybe the data you intend to extract and use for the analysis will not include that information but it is very typically included. If for no other reason than to see if you are getting multiple responses from the same "person", where person is an IP address.
 
Ballardw

Yes, I'm sure you are correct. But I personally have no way of getting such information. Unless the Qualtrics servers get hacked, your data and IP should be safe. If you feel this is an area of concern for you, please feel free to not take the survey.

Thanks,
Andrew
 
I am a resident of Wisconsin and am quite familiar with the political leanings of the U of W system. No thank you! I'll pass too.
 
Andrew, as you can see many of us are suspicious of giving personal information to an online survey. Questions of how many guns we own, what kind and where we buy them along with how much ammunition we have are not going to get answered honestly, if at all.

There are many organizations that want personal gun ownership made completely illegal, or with only a few exceptions. Most of us here take our right to keep and bear arms seriously. Not knowing how the information​ you collect will be used, and by whom is a deal breaker for me and others.
 
I was going to do it but now no way.

I suggest you drive over to Scheels and ask them if they sell Assault Rifles.
If you read farther in this site you might learn the AR doesn't mean that but there are many legal people that do own fully auto firearms and they jump through crazy hoops and prices to own them.
 
A couple of questions are equivocal. For instance the wait period for a custom item. It depends on the item and the crafts person.
If I had the money to buy a custom firearm from a big name gunsmith I'd probably be willing to wait for what ever that person's wait period was.

You seem to want to focus on our interest in foam inserts for gun cases. But most hard gun cases already come with foam. That would be true even of a multi-gun hard case.

So the only thing you have to offer is custom cut foam for multi gun cases. I don't see a very big market for that product.
 
zagbomb said:
Yes when I wrote Assault rifle I was referring to the AR that civilians can purchase. However, I did not want to limit the response so that if a person did own a military weapon, they could also respond accordingly. It is just a general question so I can generalize the controlled responses to a target market. So if 15% responded that they did own an "assault rifle," I could rationalize my marketing accordingly. Does that make sense.
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To be honest -- no, it does not make sense.

Anyone creating a graduate-level survey should know that the survey is invalid and useless unless the questions are clear, concise, accurate, and directly related to the information needed for the purpose of the survey. It is also essential, if this course is in any way related to either marketing or product development, to understand the target audience, and the industry terminology. To you, "assault rifle" apparently means both the real assault rifles AND the so-called "assault weapon" look-alikes. To those of us who are concerned with the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms (RKBA), the terms are neither synonymous nor interchangeable.

I'm being blunt not out of my customary curmudgeonliness, but to be helpful. I'm a senior citizen. I've seen and participated in a LOT of surveys, and I HATE defective surveys. Bad surveys generate bad data, and bad data generate bad decisions. Your survey is defective. Therefore, any data you derive from the survey will be defective, and any decisions made on the basis of the data will automatically be invalid.

If all you want or need to know is "Do you own one or more rifles?" -- why not ask "Do you own one or more rifles?" If you understood the market, you would know that you do NOT need to know if anyone owns a military, full-automatic M16. Look up "NFA" and the requirements. Civilian ownership of machine guns is limited by the National Firearms Act of 1934. For civilian possession, all machine guns must have been manufactured and registered with ATF prior to May 19, 1986 to be transferable between citizens. This means it's a closed market -- firearms may fall out of the market through attrition, but none can be introduced into the market. Prices for something like an NFA-legal M16 are in the tens of thousands of dollars, and THEN there's an additional $200 tax required, and a waiting period of several months before receiving the tax stamp that allows completion of the purchase.

In other words, if you are conducting market research, you should not be interested in M16s. They are irrelevant.

Consequently, whatever your hypothetical project is, you fail the course because you haven't taken the time and trouble to understand the market enough to even compile a useful survey. Anything that follows is just wasting your time.

My apologies for being candid. I know what I wrote is harsh, but if I soft-peddle it, I doubt you would get the message.
 
Thank you all for your feedback. I cannot stress enough that it is your right to not take the survey if that is your choice. I am merely seeking willing participants.

Blindstitch-
It is not a secret that I am unaware of the correct terminology for AR and I realize that now. I was merely trying to give the option for people who would consider their rifle an "assault rifle" to select that option. I am far from a firearm expert, and it was not my intention to cause offense to anyone who owns one or any other firearm. I unfortunately cannot change the question now without making the other responses invalid no matter how poorly worded the question is.

Buzzcook-
The question your referring is subjective to and will of course differ for the type of product your ordering. The point of the question is to get a general census for how long people are willing to wait for custom items. It is less about what the item actually is and more about how long people expect product purchase turn-around time to be.

The viability of the product proposal will be determined after a complete analysis of the data collected. The survey is our primary market data and is a section of the project to determine viability. It is my job as the project manager not to make sure the project has good viability, but to objectively determine what level of viability.

Thank you again, and I appreciate any form of participation.
 
Agulia Blanca-
I appreciate your honesty. I do not take offense to criticism of my survey as it know it is no were near perfect. Part the learning process is making mistakes and it is clear to me now that I have made multiple. Fortunately, my assignment is not graded on how well my survey making skills are, but more about knowing the shortcomings of my mistakes and making rational conclusions from them. I will know note in my findings that some of the data will be inviable due to the said errors. Regardless, I will persevere and be aware of issues such as this in the future. Thank you for taking the time to discuss this with me at length. I apologize if I offended you with any of the responses I posted.

Regards,

Andrew
 
I can't seem to find the right search parameters to pull things up, but I swear we've seen this every year for the last 3-4 years.
And, again, I can't seem to get results from searching, but I swear the poster was "Andrew" in the past, as well.
 
zagbomb said:
It is not a secret that I am unaware of the correct terminology for AR and I realize that now.
Click to expand...
The bigger problem may be that you even think there is a correct terminology for an AR-pattern rifle.

A couple of decades or so ago, the federal government enacted a law that labeled certain semi-automatic rifles that were (and still are) in common use and ownership as so-called "assault weapons." Echoing this federal law, a number of states enacted their own "assault weapon" bans that -- for the most part -- were copies of the federal law. Except ...

The federal Assault Weapon Ban (AWB) had a ten-year sunset provision. It wasn't renewed, so it expired ten years after it went into effect. So ... prior to 1994, anyone could own one of these so-called "assault weapons." Suddenly, as of whatever date in 1994, existing weapons that fit the definition had to be registered (at least in some states), and no new rifles falling within the definition could be sold to "civilians" within the United States. This led to the creation of what were called "post-ban" configuration rifles -- they looked superficially the same as the evil, banned "assault weapon" versions, but they lacked certain "evil" features such as a telescoping stock (the stock could look like a telescoping stock, but it couldn't actually be adjusted for length); a bayonet lug (you know, because of all the drive-by bayonetings in the 'hood); a flash hider; and magazines with a capacity larger than 10 rounds.

Probably 90 percent of Americans could not distinguish between a pre-ban AR-15 and a post-ban AR-15. They function exactly the same, but one was an "assault weapon" and the other was not.

And then along came 2004. The federal AWB expired. So a bunch of rifles that were just rifles prior to 1994, which had magically become "assault weapons" in 1994, now miraculously were not "assault weapons" -- they were now, once again, just rifles. Except, of course, in those states that still had their own AWBs, such as California, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and I think a few more. So as of 2004, the exact same rifle could be a plain, ordinary, garden variety rifle in one state but it would be an "assault weapon" in another state.

And then there was the Sandy Hook school shooting, and several states revised their assault weapons ban laws such that even rifles that had been legal post-ban configuration (i.e not "assault weapons") were instantly transformed into "assault weapons."

So now we have three levels of classification: the original, semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15 (and the AK-47 and several others, but for simplicity we'll stay with the AR-15 platform); then the "post-ban" configuration that was legal under the 1994 to 2004 AWB; and now the newer, more restrictive definition in states such as New York, California and Connecticut that made even post-ban legal rifles into "assault weapons" simply by changing the definition.

You don't know this, yet you asked marketing questions that directly relate to this. You used the term "assault rifle" apparently thinking you were asking about "assault weapons," yet you don't know that there are at least four or five definitions in various laws of just what an "assault weapon" is.

I don't think anyone was offended by your asking about assault rifles or by your use of the term, but (speaking only for myself) it certainly caused me to sit up and take notice. First, it showed that you don't know enough to be asking the question. Second, the act that you used what is generally an outdated, outmoded term except in those states that still have AWBs is a factor that gives rise to serious concerns regarding your motives in conducting the survey. (Correction -- you actually used a correct term with a very specific meaning, but it applies only to military firearms and I don't think you really intended to ask only about military M16s. I believe you wrote "assault rifle" but meant "assault weapon.")

Today, in probably (approximately) 45 or so states, a semi-automatic AR-15 or AK-47 is NOT an assault rifle and is NOT an "assault weapon." Those of us who own and shoot such rifles know this. So, if your goal in the survey is to find out who owns rifles that look like an AR-15 or AK-47, you really need to use some other language to ask the question, because anyone in those 45 (or so) states who is at all literal or who doesn't feel like playing mind reader is going to say "Nope, not me" while gazing fondly at his or her collection of fifteen AR-15s and ten AK-47s.
 
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Aguila-
It is clear you are very knowledge about firearms and you made it very clear that I know very little. I can assure you and anyone else that my intentions with this survey were not malicious and that asking for some responses while unknowningly being unprepared was my fault. If you feel it necessary I will remove the link as to not cause you anymore concern. Just let me know.

Thank you for anyone who participated.

Andrew
 
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