Only one in five gun owners belong to the NRA, so we think there is something else going on than just the NRA when it comes to mobilisation.
Abbie Vetger
September 2, 2018
Gun owners are more politically active, study finds
[The naiveté and lack of rigor here is astounding. Were they paid money to do this “study”?
Vetger and her colleagues need to check their work. A very simple check would have revealed the following:
Most estimates of gun ownership are between 20 and 40 percent of people in the U.S.. And this assumes all gun owners admit they own guns when they are asked by a pollster. It may be much higher than this.
The population of the U.S. is currently about 330,000,000. This means there are between 66 and 132 million gun owners in the U.S.
The NRA claims a membership of about 6 million people. Hence only about one in 11 to one in 22 gun owners belong to the NRA. Unless, you hypothesize the NRA is telling the world they have far fewer members than they actually have. For them to have such a motive escapes me.
Simple arithmetic shows any influence gun owners have must be far beyond the members the NRA influences.Assuming all the NRA’s 6 million members vote and vote as a block for the NRA agenda in an eligible voting population of about 241 million people is only about 2.5%. Sure, some political races are as close or closer than that but that isn’t enough to make a big difference and the assumption they all vote as a block is almost for certain false.
So… if the hypothesis that the NRA is the source of power is of questionable validity how about the hypothesis that gun owners a group independent of NRA members being a source of election strength? 60 to 126 million out of 241 million is about 25% to 50%. Now you are talking about some real power!
Therefore the timid conclusions reached by Vetger can be arrived at, and stated with far more assuredness, with a few minutes of searching on the Internet without going through the grant process and publishing a peer reviewed paper.
I wonder if Vetger and company were among those making projections that Hillary Clinton had a 95% chance of winning the 2016 election. If not then I expect she at least rode the same short bus to school with them.—Joe]
I recall some polling that shows far more people identify as NRA members than actually are.
Lots of people bought a one year membership 5 years ago and still consider themselves NRA members.
Here it is.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2018/07/dean-weingarten/pew-poll-14-million-americans-identify-as-nra-members/
Given the topic, does that make it a pew-pew-pew Pew poll?
QOTD!! QOTD!!
What many of these presumed researchers also don’t understand is that a significant number of gun owners don’t join the NRA because they consider the organization far too accommodating of the anyi-gunners. They don’t think NRA is hard-core enough!
My thoughts precisely. I suppose it would be pointless to ask if she had researched membership in GOA, Zelman Partisans, etc., as well as those who simply spend their money on ammunition and accessories, as opposed to political memberships that seem to spend their money on unwanted, near-daily bulk mailings.
“Therefore the timid conclusions reached by Vetger can be arrived at, and stated with far more assuredness, with a few minutes of searching on the Internet without going through the grant process and publishing a peer reviewed paper.” Probably true. But the purpose of grants and papers isn’t to deliver information, in particularly not to deliver it efficiently. Instead, its purposes are (a) to send money to the university, (b) to help the authors obtain tenure. The fact that the information is partly obvious and partly wrong isn’t all that relevant to these goals.
This is another datapoint supporting the idea that truth is not a value for Leftists.
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Hi Abbie, I’m ProGunFred. I’m a 2A dead ender. That means I will die with my guns. See, there is more going on here than you thought. Stay home, don’t come out here looking for us, it’s for your own safety, really.