Following the money
Remember yesterday when I told you that the press was likely taking dictation from The Violence Policy Center? Well, turns out the study that both the press and the Violence Policy Center relied on to assert that gun ownership was down was done by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC). Guess who has funded NORC? Why, our old pals at the Joyce Foundation, who have a long history of funding anti-gun shills.
Update: And the reporter, Bernd Debusmann, has an interesting, err, philosophy.
Update 2: Kim calls BS:
U.S. population in 1980: 226.5 million. (Census)
So if that number of 54% gun owners in 1977 is correct, that would mean… there were over 100 million gun owners in the U.S. back then?
I wish. We’re only getting up to that number now.
Update 3: What I did yesterday, Kevin did back in May
January 11th, 2008 at 10:00 am
(This is a comment that I also posted yesterday on Snowflakes In Hell, another gun blog.)
FYI, the NORC GSS results are based on two components.
The core questions remain relatively constant over time, cover a broad range of topics, and are not funded by organizations like the Joyce Foundation. There are only a few questions related to gun ownership, and the wording appears to be fairly neutral. The household gun ownership data in this component appears to be accurate as far as it goes, but there are not really enough questions to properly flesh out the results. For example, the GSS does not ask how many gun owners per household.
In addition to the core questions, the GSS also includes various add-on, topical modules that are funded by outside groups, including Joyce. The gun-related questions in this component have been so biased (or poorly worded) that any conclusions are meaningless.
The Joyce Foundation/VPC generally seeks to use the credibility of the neutral GSS core questions to strengthen the credibility of the biased results in the topical module. It’s a method to disguise advocacy as objective research.