Gun Control Advocates. There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute
It is difficult to tell whether gun control advocates actually believe the things they say, blindly parrot whatever they hear or just completely make things up to fit their anti-rights agenda. The answer to this should be clear for the top brass of gun control organizations – there is simply no way that they can not have the facts yet they still choose to disregard them to push their bogus schemes. Among rank-and-file anti-gunners there is likely a mix of the three, which sometimes makes it difficult to separate the shills from the truly brainwashed – the low information crowd, as it were.
Recently, after sending out a tweet containing a link to join NRA, we received an interesting response. As gun control zealots are often wont to do, this twitter user masquerades as something they’re not, claiming to represent NRA members’ opinions while using the TCOT hashtag and a picture of one of the founding fathers as their profile picture – presumably hoping that readers would blindly accept it as truth. Also in typical gun-control-zealot fashion, the user claims to only be interested in reducing gun violence (the old “common sense gun laws” rhetoric) while operating a blood-dancing website that lists people injured by firearms (although conveniently ignoring any legitimate use of firearms such as self defense).
The tweet sent to us read as follows:
@GunLink @NRA 74% of NRA members are in favor of univ bgd checks so why isn’t the leadership? Cos they don’t care about their members #tcot.
This certainly didn’t sound right, so I dug into it a little bit. It was trivial to find the surveys (performed during the knee-jerk reactions in the weeks following the Newtown shootings) referenced in the tweet, so I took a look at them. The first thing I noted was that, factoring in one survey’s margin of error for this result, the number might be just over 66% rather than the claimed 74%, which still seemed high.
Given the tweet sent to us, one might infer that the pollsters surveyed some NRA members and 74% of them said they want background checks, but this is far from the case. What really happened was that, out of the 2,703 people surveyed, they found around 100 people who claimed to be NRA members who might support (even just a little bit), a policy “requiring a background check system for all gun sales to make sure a purchaser is not legally prohibited from having a gun.”
Combining questionable polling methods, poorly worded questions, post-Newtown knee jerk emotions and other factors in play here, it doesn’t take a lot of critical thinking to start smelling the tweet above for what it really is. A hundred people claiming to be NRA members who say that maybe gun purchasers should be screened to make sure they aren’t prohibited is the same as 74% of NRA members calling for “universal background checks?” Give me a break.
I suppose we will disregard the notion that with NRA membership numbers around 5 million (which the media claims is exaggerated anyway) and a US population of 314 million, a random sampling of 2,703 individuals should net 43 NRA members, not the nearly 4 times that number claimed (and unverified) in the poll.
Here is what the NRA has to say in response to a similar poll:
Whenever NRA reviews other organizations’ surveys or polls that claim to represent the views of NRA members, we do so with a suspicious eye. Our membership rolls are not released, so it’s impossible for organizations that have no access to the NRA’s membership list, to “test the pulse” of NRA members as effectively as NRA can.
That’s why we viewed with skepticism a recent Pew Research poll, particularly its supposed findings regarding “NRA Households.” While NRA does not dispute everything in the poll, the results cited do show some now-familiar inaccuracies. We know the findings are inaccurate because we recently completed our own polling, of our own members.
[…]
The Pew poll went on to state, “Yet people in NRA households [ed. note: this means respondents who claim to live in a household which includes an NRA member, not necessarily NRA members themselves] overwhelmingly favor making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks: 74% favor this proposal while just 26% are opposed.” On the contrary, our own survey showed conclusively that NRA members strongly oppose these measures.
[…]
The NRA survey of randomly selected NRA members across the country is the only legitimate survey of NRA members on these issues.
[…]
NRA opposes, and will continue to oppose, “universal” background checks and registration schemes.
To accept the premise of the poll, we would need to suspend common sense and buy into the idea that the membership rolls of an organization whose leadership is in direct opposition to the desires of their members is growing by leaps and bounds rather than plummeting.
Skewed information like this is a powerful tool used by anti-gunners to discourage those in the pro-Constitution camp and they know it. This is why their organizations keep touting such figures as fact while their brainwashed shills and uninformed followers amplify it through their social media echo chambers. Hopefully this will serve as a reminder to keep fighting the good fight, to take what you see and hear with a grain of salt and to look deeper into things rather than blindly believing them.
On a parting note, here is a related Mr. Colion Noir video, complete with wife-beating and zombie references, for your viewing pleasure:
