Democrats and Democratic-leaning gun possessors up 1/3 in two years, but why?
http://www.gallup.com/poll/150353/self-reported-gun-ownership-highest-1993.aspx
The latest (2011) survey on firearm self-reporting by the Gallup organization shows that 40% of those who identified themselves as Democrats and Democratic-leaning now have access to firearms. This is up a whopping one-third from 2009. Little has been written about this big upsurge, even as the number of Republicans with access to guns has remained rather stagnant over the last several years.
The Gallup people are understandably reluctant to say whether or not the trend will continue, but in an earlier survey (2005) they did make this summary regarding the respective reasons for gun possession:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/20098/gun-ownership-use-america.aspx
"Republican and Democratic gun owners are almost equally likely to say they use a gun for protection against crime, 64% to 69%, respectively. However, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they use a gun for target shooting (71% to 53%) or for hunting (64% to 53%)."
One cannot conclude offhand that the Democratic increase is roughly for the same reasons, but it is hard to imagine the surge comes from a sudden desire to hunt more, or for target range-shooting. Of course Democrats may be wholly unaware of falling violent crime rates, and have bought into the "if it bleeds it leads" mantra of local T.V. newz. But perhaps they have over the last several years concluded:
(1) The swaggering GOP murder-mouthing about "Second Amendment remedies" is aimed at them; and or
(2) That what they have been told about guns by gun-controller/banners has been disproved, and that there are legitimate reasons for having guns readily available.
What reasons do you think account for the 33% increase in Democratic gun possession over the last 2 years?
= new reply since forum marked as read
It's been done to death already. You think posting it again and misrepresenting it again is going to fool different people? Or just get some more people who don't actually care what the surveys say to say Oh yes, oh yes, oh joy, gunz is good!
Did a bunch of Republicans really get rid of their guns in 2009 and 2010, and then they (or a bunch of others) ran out and bought guns in 2011?
I like this one:
Did almost 1/3 of gun owners in the East get rid of them in 2010, and then replace them (or be replaced by new owners) in 2011?
You start breaking down 1000 people from a nation-wide survey into all the categories they've broken them down into:
and some of those percentages are standing for single bloody digit numbers. (Who wants to guess how many college-graduate women aged 55+ living in the East who vote Democratic reported having a firearm in the household?)
For this survey, Gallup reported a margin of error of 4% for the full 1005-person sample. Roughly speaking, the margin of error for a poll is proportional to the inverse of the square root of the number of people surveyed (though it also depends on things like the sampling method and how much weighting was done).
That means that if you look at just people in the East, for example, if we assume that this is just one quarter of the original sample, the margin of error would jump to ±8%.
It also means that if you assume Dems and Dem leaners make up about half the population, then the margin of error there would be 4% times the square root of two, which is about 1.4, so this is about ±5.6%
Another thing is that, again roughly speaking, the margin of error for the difference between two separate polls with similar sample sizes is going to be about root-2 times the margin of error of the individual polls. So that means that the margin of error for the difference between the number of Democratic gun owners in 2010 and 2011 here is ±8%, which also happens to be the actual difference between those two numbers, so the increase in Dem gun ownership in 2011 is right on the edge of being statistically significant. To actually determine whether this falls within the 95% confidence interval, you'd have to calculate the margin of error more accurately, beyond my "back-of-the-envelope" calculation, and also look at the next decimal place. The difference between 2011 and 2009 is statistically significant, but comparing 2009 and 2011 is sort of cherry picking, particularly since the difference between 2011 and 2008 or 2007 is not.
In addition to the margin of error, it's important to realize is that the General Social Survey, which is considered the "gold standard" by social scientists, hasn't actually shown any increase in gun ownership -- GSS shows a steady decline in the 90s, flattening out in the 2000s. Of course, since GSS only happens on even years now, there's no 2011 GSS data to compare this to.
Barrack Hussein Obama is going to ban all your guns and G-men are coming to confiscate them! 
