'Major poll shows gun ownership in decline'

It really isn't that hard to find.

publicdata.norc.org:41000/gss/Documents/Codebook/A.pdf

It's not the messenger. The sample is a national probability sample, spread around the country. Statistically it will do a better job of predicting the national population than any other survey design. It is sure a lot better than anecdote and gut feel.

That said, I believe it is inaccurate in this case. Not because of flawed sampling, but for the reason so many here on TFL cite. Since 1972 fewer and fewer people have been willing to provide any answer to that question (and it is just one question about gun ownership).

I think most of the refusals are probably owners but I have no data to support that. In point of fact the closest thing we have is the NSSF NICS data. And it is an analog at best. Their formula attempts to extract the permit checks, transfers, and pawn remits. So the NSSF data are an approximation of new sales absent other administrative checks. But it assumes purchases/transfers are equivalent to ownership.

The only truly knowledgeable body is the industry itself. They know their own sales. They know how many are exported and how many are government sales. But their data are proprietary and they are disinclined to share.

So, if we actually want to know the answer we have to be willing to cooperate. Absent that it is all uniformed speculation.
 
Gauging gun ownership based on gun sales is also flawed. We all know that a gun owner is more likely to purchase another gun than a non-gun owner is to purchase his/her first gun. Still, I believe the NRA tracks gun ownership to the extent that it can, and I'd trust its estimates over any survey.
 
We all know that a gun owner is more likely to purchase another gun than a non-gun owner is to purchase his/her first gun.
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Do we? 80% of my rifle sales from 12/2012-04/2013 were to first-time buyers.
 
80% of my rifle sales from 12/2012-04/2013 were to first-time buyers.
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I don't dispute your numbers but how do you know they were first-time buyers?

FYI: Waaaaaaaay back when a journalism course I took run by a professor that had a 'thing' for statistics showed us that if the sample were truly random then about 1600 was all you really had to 'poll' or 'sample' to be pretty sure of the results. That is, a company making light bulbs (all made exactly the same of course) could test a random sampling of 1600 bulbs and then tell you pretty closely how long they would last and what chance you had of getting a bad bulb would be.

Obviously you cannot 'survey' folk at the SHOT show for firearms stuff any more than you could survey NPR members for gun stuff. You have to have a representative sample. Getting a 'representative' sample is where the expertise comes in and where the polling companies show whose the top dog and who is the also ran.

See Jimmy Stuart in the movie 'Magic Town' for more polling expertise.
 
Joseph Goebbels Quote

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
 
Well since records aren't supposed to be kept... All buyers are first time buyers lol...

I shot my AR today... I'm so ashamed and I went home feeling dirty
 
I don't dispute your numbers but how do you know they were first-time buyers?
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If you maintain your records in digital form, it's an easy thing to check. The majority of rifle buyers during that period had no prior history with us.

Does that constitute a representative sample? No, but it does cast some doubt on the idea that the panic buying was largely existing gun owners who decided to augment their collections.

(The folks paying 300-400% premiums on the secondary market certainly weren't informed members of the gun culture.)
 
I won't claim to understand the arcana of statistical analysis, but I have always had my doubts about how any poll (sample) of a thousand or two thousand people can actually be accurately representative of the over 300 MILLION people in this country.
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The idea was that the standard error of proportion is based on a division by the square root of the sample size. When you got above 1200 participants, increasing sample size didn't really increase power that much usefully. One problem with megadata is that everything is now statistically significant due to the increase in sample size and shrinking of the standard error. Other methods are being devised and NHST is seen on the way out. NHST = null hypothesis significance testing. So all those hated stat courses are obsolete. Hahaha!

Taught that crap for years!

Anyway, if you buy into the 1200 subject argument, the validity of the sample becomes paramount. It assumes a sample that mirrors the population. With a 300 million size group - as pointed out a representative sample of a resistant sample is quite a problem.

Gun research is fraught with biases and you have to know the honesty of the players.
 
Yes you will get somewhat different answers depending on face-to-face (FtF), telephone or paper/web surveys.

Possible causes:
FtF and phone may have the interviewer clarify questions.
FtF and phone may have bias introduced by those clarifications.
FtF and phone interviewers may attempt to get clarification or try to overcome initial refusals or try to keep respondent cooperating.
Verbal emphasis in the way Ftf and phone surveys are conducted may change impact on respondent.
Paper / web surveys rely more on respondents reading level.

We won't even go into the bits where interviewers make data entry errors accidentally or intentionally.

And lots more differences.
 
One of the classic statistics assignments is determining the percentage of white vs black marbles in a bathtub. The problem assumes even distribution of the marbles and the sample taken from all areas inside the bathtub. The percentages can be mostly determined with a relatively small sample size vs the total marble count in the bathtub.

But people aren't marbles and the US isn't a bathtub. Getting a truly even distribution of responders and truly unbiased responses is almost impossible even if pollsters make the attempt but most don't have the time/money for that.

Most pollsters are hired and may bias the poll toward the customer's expected outcome. Most responders tend to nuance their answers to controversial subjects. That's when you see polls showing maybe 70% for/against but the actual outcome much different.
 
It's an intensively focused survey of non gun owners in a anti gun Metro conducted as a teaching tool by students learning statistical techniques. There is no basis for real world application of the results.

Nothing in this survey is worth discussing, it's completely junk. Better to discuss which one of Bloombergs shadow groups handed the cash to NORC to conduct it and get the obvious answers they would.

It's not about statistical variance and probability. They knew going out there would be extremely slanted views they would gather, as very few would admit in public they owned a firearm in a jurisdiction that is anti gun.

Same survey in Manhattan would get even worse percentages.

"Hi, we're interviewing the man on the street, do you own guns?" "Why yes, I do, in fact I'm carrying a new AR Pistol I just finished assembling right here in my tennis bag, even has the Brace on it. "

Think about it - concealed is concealed, in Metro Chicago IIRC there's only one or two gun stores at all.

Of course ownership is "declining." But that is about to change dramatically.
 
Interestingly on polls, the Israeli election just went against the polls as those polled probably refused to answer.

Just an example of polling, not interested in that outcome here.
 
Polls can be fun to read. You really have to get multiple data sets. Oftentimes it's also useful to get polls about related subjects to support a pattern.

Here's the result of a poll on a related subject:
http://news.yahoo.com/gun-control-advocates-lose-another-round-departure-atf-202659404.html

The last paragraph is the relevant connection:

"By a margin of 52 percent to 46 percent, Americans say protecting the rights of gun owners is more important than gun control, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center released in December. The survey, which came just two years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was the first time Pew found more support for gun ownership than gun control in more than two decades of surveys on the issue."
 
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