A Reminder on Different Priorities

The poll that remains up for this week’s NRA-ILA poll of activists is a stark reminder that not all of our fellow gun owners have the same priorities:

More than a quarter of the respondents don’t even have a concealed carry license. And only 3% believe that their names have been published. Considering that most papers who publish those databases do so for the entire state, the number is likely much, much higher than 3%. Even though I never saw it, I know my information was published by the Roanoke paper in Virginia.

Keep in mind, this is a poll not only of people who are members of NRA, but care enough to sign up for the ILA weekly grassroots alerts. And not just that subset, but people who care enough to actually click through and take the poll. So, on one hand, it’s not a perfectly representative sample. On the other hand, it does show that even among those who are passionate about the issue, our interests vary – and we shouldn’t throw those with other ideas under the bus if we can still bring them along in the broader fight for our rights.

10 thoughts on “A Reminder on Different Priorities”

  1. Online polls are a laugh. They are easily hijacked, and not scientific in any way. I have about as much faith in online polls as I do in the U.S Dollar.

  2. I made all of those notes about who receives the poll so that you would know it’s no where near an exact representation of all NRA members. However, I’ve never seen any indication that the polls get hijacked. The 3% number, in my opinion, probably represents a very generous number of concealed carry owners who know their information has been published in the media.

    These are still interesting to look at as a loose guide. And your dollars are still useful for buying things like food, water, and shelter. Don’t discount some usefulness of either thing.

  3. Keep in mind that a lot of NRA members reside in crappy states like IL, CA, and NY that make it difficult or impossible to get a CCW permit. They’re gonna skew that number.

  4. Exactly what I was thinking, Nate. I don’t know how many of them are NRA members, but New Jersey has a huge number of gun owners because our population density balances out our relatively low ownership rate. I care a hell of a lot about keeping and bearing handguns for self defense, but as the survey is worded, I’d have to answer simply “I do not have a carry permit”.

  5. I wonder what the poll would look like if it asked “do you have a hunting license?”
    How passionate are you about that?

  6. I wonder how many of the respondents saying “not that I know of” live in Tennessee, where a paper published the names of every holder in the entire state in 2009. B@st@rds.

  7. Markie Marxist sez: “How can my commie compadres in corporate HR departments scrub a list of job applicants against a list of CCW holders, who as private gun owners are obviously not good communists, if we don’t have the list of CCW holders? It’s just common communist sense to strip private gun owners of privacy so that we can discriminate against them. Rejecting job applications from people who carry deadly weapons is an easy sell at corporate, and they’re a minority that doesn’t even have any legal protection from discrimination the way that OUR minority constituent groups do. So, no jobs for them! Ha! Ha!”

  8. Bitter:

    I didn’t say this poll got hijacked, just that polls do get hijacked from time to time. Next, you don’t need to be an NRA member to participate in the poll in question. I answered it, and it never asked for my membership number or for me to log in. Third, the sample size of the poll in question was not disclosed. There could have been 24 respondents. Or there could have been a high number of respondents from AK, VT, and AZ were permits are a non issue.

    Now my faith in the U.S dollar. It’s buying a lot less this year then it did last year or the year before. The falling dollar is also making international travel much more expensive. The only thing I have faith in is the continued decline of the dollar.

    The short version: Don’t put too much stock in online polls.

  9. Maybe it’s just evidence that while NRA has become the pre-eminent gun rights lobby in the US, a substantial portion of the membership has actual Rifles as their priority.

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