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Gun control groups claim to support the Second Amendment. “We don’t want to take away anyone’s guns,” they routinely assert. “We just want sensible gun laws to keep guns away from criminals and mentally ill people.” No matter how many times they say it, no matter how credulously or complicity the media accepts it, it’s a lie. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, Everytown for Gun Safety, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence – they all want to disarm all Americans (save the police and other government agents). Every now and then, they just can’t help themselves . . .

They let the mask slip.

The CSGV’s Facebook post above links to a Washington Post article America has more guns in fewer hands than ever before. The piece claims that the number of gun owning households, down historically, remains steady. The survey highlighted pegs the number at 32 percent. Another survey mentioned puts that number significantly higher . . .

Naturally, gun-rights advocates tell a different story. They point to different polls, like Gallup, which show higher rates of gun ownership than the GSS. But even the most recent Gallup data paints a picture of fewer houses owning guns: 42 percent in October of last year, down from a high of 51 percent in 1993.

“Naturally?” Knee-jerk anti-gun journos…whatcha gonna do? In any case, to recap, Ladd Everitt‘s mob urges readers to “keep pushing with us.” For what?

To reduce that number further! How low? What would be an “acceptable” rate of gun ownership in a country whose citizens have a natural, civil and Constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms? No one’s ever asked Mr Everitt that question. [Note to Everitt: consider yourself asked.] But the smart money says all the way to zero.

Like I said, civilian disarmament.

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51 COMMENTS

  1. curious just how large the “underreporting” bias is?

    if someone surveyed me asking if i owned guns i wouldn’t say yes

    • This, a million times this. There is a correlation between increasing distrust of the government and “fewer” gun owning households.

    • Joe Huffman just did a nice analysis of this very bias over on his blog. He noted that the alleged decrease in households owning a gun corresponded nicely to an increase in those households reporting a “No Opinion” (or perhaps a “None of your damned business”) response to that question. If you add the no opinion and yes answers together, that total has remained nearly constant – and well onto the +50% side – for many years.

    • If someone “surveyed” me, I’d tell him to mind his own damn business and remove my contact information from his system.
      Given that gun owners tend to have an independent streak, I suspect many others would do the same.

    • In a two-decade period, the number cycles 20%. From a practical standpoint: is it even possible – much less, practical – that such numbers of firearms are being transferred privately among households in such a short period of time?

      From what I can see, the only logical explanation is that people respond with varying degrees of truthfulness to such surveys, for various reasons. It is simply implausible that 20% of US households divest themselves of all firearms over a ten-year span, and then 20% of US households acquire/re-acquire firearms over the next ten-year span – especially considering that this cycle has repeated itself continuously since about 1950.

  2. These people want us to be a third world country like Mexico where only the corrupt and the criminal have guns. That is the inevitable result when only the government and criminals have guns.
    They can’t possibly believe that any law would keep guns away from criminals.

  3. This is true America I guess, not stupid WP articles:

    As far as surveys are concerned, “it has become increasingly difficult to contact potential respondents and to persuade them to participate. The percentage of households in a sample that are successfully interviewed – the response rate – has fallen dramatically. At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.”

    http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/09/30/we-are-the-91-only-9-of-americans-cooperate-with-pollsters/

  4. So, the takeaway message is the harder you make it for law abiding citizens to own a gun, the fewer of us that do. As soon as you remove the roadblocks, ownership starts climbing right back up.

    And that’s why we have to fight them on even the small issues. Be warned, they’re shifting from federal level assaults to state-by-state.

  5. Well, even if Ladd Everitt doesn’t succeed with his disarmament jihad, he can still pride himself one on thing: having, hands down, the douche-iest facial hair on planet Earth.

  6. ” After completing his degree, he [Everitt] worked as a Research Associate with the U.S. €‘Saudi Arabian Business Council in Washington, DC “

  7. Ever wonder why CSGV focuses on guns and not gangs? It’s because they are part of the Progressive hive and they see crime as the most effective tool for social control. Gangs are the allies not their enemies.

    Definition of a Progressive: A person who believes with religious fervor in a 19th Century doctrine that failed in the 20th Century.

    • The progressive line seems to be that the criminals are just misunderstood, bad childhood, grew up in the wrong part of town and so on. Not really their fault that they broke the law or killed someone. Therefore, it must be someone or something else’s fault. Easy to say that guns, too many guns, etc. are the issue as that goes along with their way of looking at society. The problem is that their viewpoint ignores and therefore does nothing to correct the real issues.

      • But that’s like blaming the guillotines for the French Reign of Terror, not Robespierre. Or blaming the soil and shovels in Cambodia, for the killing fields, NOT the Khmer Rouge. See how inane that is?

  8. Just curious–has the CSGV ever, in fact, specifically claimed that they “support the 2nd Amendment” a’ la Kelly-Giffords, or that they are “not anti-gun” a’ la the action-deficient “moms”?

  9. So lets get this straight, according to them they do not want to infringe on the second ammendment are completely ok with law abiding citizens owning guns and just want to keep the criminals and baddies from having access to guns right? But yet they are happy when their survey shows that fewer homes own guns and then call for people to keep up the good work? Huh?

    Do they just not care anymore or have they really gotten so careless (or maybe bold?) that they are letting their true motives shine through?

  10. What the he** is in this Kool-Aid they are drunk on? This ain’t the old stuff. After even the MSM over the last 6 years has touted ever increasing gun sales by women, senior citizens, concerned Americans, preppies, etc,..The Annointed One being the best gun salesman ever, we have this opening stat?
    I sure am glad I quit all that mind altering stuff in the 80’s, it’s more fun to see delusional folks straight and sober.

  11. For the first part of its history the CSGV was the National Coalition to Ban Handguns. They just changed their name for political purposes. Like gun control becomes gun safety and common sense.

  12. oh look. . . .they are looking to hire a data clerk who will have access to donor records. . . . . 🙂

    • Dirk!

      Haven’t seen you in so long I wondered if Mrs.Diggler found your folder of Shannon pics on your computer…;)

  13. How many gun owners with any common sense at all would respond yes to someone calling with a poll? Think that is the real reason this poll shows lower number of gun owners.

  14. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: these numbers are totally meaningless. Put aside the obvious underreporting bias (notice a trend in the reported levels of trust in government? http://www.people-press.org/2014/11/13/public-trust-in-government/ ), but if you pull at the numbers a little bit you see how shaky they are. According to the GSS between 2000 and 2001 3% more Americans went out and bought a gun. Really? So there were 10 million NEW gun owners in a year? And two years later these owners apparently decided to get rid of them, since the percentage owning a gun dropped back down. And if these numbers are so solid, why does Gallup show a completely different trend (i.e. essentially flat over time http://www.people-press.org/2013/03/12/section-3-gun-ownership-trends-and-demographics/ ) with gun ownership sitting right around 43% of households and 30% of people surveyed. SURVEYS ARE USELESS DATASETS for almost everything, and doubly so when it involves people telling a random person on the phone about the stuff you own.

  15. Ok I have to ask for RF.
    Does anyone have the specific questions and data collection techniques?
    This makes a huge difference for the studies validity. I tend to agree with others here. If someone called me for a survey and asked if I owned a firearm, my first response would be no.

  16. This could be a good thing for us if they actually believe that. Most gun owners know better than to admit gun ownership unless by necessity. Honestly my grandmother is the only person i know that does not have multiple firearms in their home.

    I sold all of mine.. im a born again passafist, and I trust the authority’s and gawd to protect my family.

  17. The week before elections 2014 I answered one of those polling calls. There were about 30 questions, it took about 20 minutes. There were questions about everything from what kind of furnace did we have (gas, electric or other) to political policy questions regarding social issues (same gendered unions to be specific). And I gave my 100% honest opinions on every question until. “Do you have any firearms in your home?” Now, I’m not really the trusting type. If they had asked how many flat screen TV’s or how many electronic devices we have that connect to the internet I probably wouldn’t trust them with the information. But the wording of the questions made this whole thing an obvious attempt to sway opinions to the left. First I asked if I had to answer that question. I had invested some time into this and did want my opinions tabulated. But they informed me that If I refused to answer the question my survey would be thrown out. So, I lied. Nope, no guns here. I am absolutely certain I am not alone in refusing to honestly answer that question.

  18. “America has more guns in fewer hands than ever before” — this is impossible and our side should make a bigger effort to disprove it — publicly. The numbers do not add up.

    Firstly — NICS tells us that US citizens purchased over 200M guns just since the late 1990’s. In order for their [CSGV] concept to plausible — a few million people would have had to purchase tens of thousands of dollars worth of guns. As gun ownership tends to be very low in affluent cities & suburbs — then you are looking at a HUGE expense for Main St America.

    Phone surveys are usually a poor source of information generally and a very poor source of “hard” information. Many of us will not participate in intrusive surveys and I would NEVER tell some poll-taker that I was a gun owner. Considering that “gun ownership” *should* include FUDDS and everyone who has not disposed of firearms purchased by their ancestors — how could gun ownership DECLINE at all — while 20M guns were sold in 2013 alone? Guns are not a consumable. They can last forever and so should simply accumulate — unless large numbers of people “de-gun” their households.

    That is not happening — but the consumers of theses MSM stories are not looking at NICS data and then referring back to the article. The “Journalists” that report these stories without looking at easily available data are simply spreading outright lies.

  19. Guns? There are no guns at my house….. there was this tragic outhouse fire a few years ago….. yup no guns at my house.

  20. I expect that the number of gun owners to honestly answer this question about on par with the number of guys who report their penis size accurately.

    I would never tell a stranger that I own any firearms.

  21. More like fewer are willing to answer yes on a poll from a news organization.

    Any gun store will tell you the makeup of their customers, and quite a lot of them will say they’ve been seeing a lot of new, and a lot of female faces.

    The supposition that the number of gun owners is decreasing is simple wishful thinking from the left.

  22. This is anecdotal, but I’ve been a gun owner for 15+ years. The biggest challenge in suburban NYC was finding a place to shoot. In the last two years, three ranges have opened within a 40 minutes drive of my house. One of them already had to double capacity and all three are going gangbusters. Not sure how that is possible in an environment where gun ownership is going down. I suspect gun ownership reporting is going down.

  23. Here’s another inconsistency in their arguments. They keep claiming that gun owners are “paranoid” and “anti-government” and “insurrectionists.” So, since these statistics are based on surveys, if most gun owners really do fit that description, why would they honestly answer “yes” to the question of whether or not they own guns? Of course, I’m not trying to say that a gun owner who’s skeptical of a survey like that automatically fits their asinine description, I’m merely saying that they’re being inconsistent with their arguments and dishonestly ignoring explanations to the stats that they cite.

    • Something else that I noticed while reading the article:

      “There’s no question that gun rights groups like the NRA are winning the battle for hearts and minds on the issue. A December 2014 Pew Research Center poll showed that for the first time in two decades, there is more support among Americans for gun rights than gun control.”

      Funny how they fail to mention what he wrote there.

  24. Pure poppycock.

    There is no evidence that any intentional gun owners are completely divesting themselves of their ownership, and statistics show a steady increase of women becoming first-time gun owners and permit holders, which points to a net INCREASE in individual gun ownership, not a decrease.

    Which proves that CSGV’s assertion is facially false.

  25. Counting on a leftist to keep his fascism hidden is like counting on a rabid dog to keep his rabies hidden.

    Never, ever, ever trust a leftist.

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