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How Public Opinion Polls Mislead Politicians
Comments Made at the Fed Up Rally, Parliament Hill
September 22, 1994
H. Taylor Buckner
 
 
        For much of my academic career I have studied prejudice against 
minorities. I thought I was changing topics when I started studying gun 
control advocates, but I was not. Ignorance and stereotyping are the 
hallmarks of prejudice - and of gun control.
 
        Public opinion is complex. Canadians fear crime and do not know 
what Canada's gun control laws are. When you ask someone a question on a 
topic about which they know nothing, you get a very naive response. When 
a pollster asks "should we have more gun control?," they answer yes, 
thinking it will make them safer. If you ask, "should the government 
eliminate poverty?," they will also say yes. This is wishful thinking, 
not firmly held opinion. Politicians, seeing the apparently large support 
for gun control, think the public will be pleased by more controls. They 
are making the fundamental error of confusing the number of responses 
with the strength of the opinion. 
 
        In my own surveys, I found that 99% of Concordia University 
students did not know there is a five year sentence for an illegal 
handgun, they mostly guessed a $500 fine. They thought that handguns 
accounted for two-thirds of the murders in Canada, when the reality is 
fewer than one in five. When presented with the choice, they supported 
the present law as strongly as they did the petition they signed. 
Eighty-nine percent did not know the difference between a rifle and a 
shotgun; two-thirds did not know that the magazine of  a gun does not 
have a trigger. While the general public may be better informed than 
university students, there is a lot of ignorance out there.
 
        The government helps to keep Canadians ignorant. No government 
spokesman has pointed out that every Canadian who wants a gun has to take 
a safety course, get references, and be checked by the police. No 
spokesman has pointed out that buying a handgun requires two safety 
courses, three separate police investigations, and 12 letters of 
reference. The government suggests that their own statistics, which show 
that FAC holding gun owners are not the problem, should not be trusted. 
The government fails to note that almost three-quarters of all homicides, 
and half of domestic firearms homicides, are committed by people with 
criminal records, who could not buy a gun legally.
 
        This ignorance is exploited by citing American homicide studies 
where a majority of the victims and perpetrators were criminals, as if 
this applied to Canadian gun owners who have been certified after police 
investigation to be non-criminals. It is exploited by leading the public 
to believe that assault weapons are legally available in Canada. It is 
exploited by citing the rare suicides that might not have happened if 
there were no gun present, instead of the vast majority of suicides where 
people have really decided to end their lives. It is exploited by making 
much of the sixty accidental firearms deaths a year, without noting that 
this figure has been falling for years. It is exploited by comparing the 
registration of guns with the registration of dog, without mentioning 
that the Prime Minister does not want to confiscate dogs.
 
        Politicians may wind up being the victims of their own "ignorance 
machine."  Suppose they pass a new set of controls. The Coalition for Gun 
Control will not be satisfied, because all the guns did not vanish. 
Newspaper editorialists, who like to think steak grows on Styrofoam trays 
in the supermarket, will still write that the politicians "sold out"  to 
the gun lobby, because there will still be some guns. The general public 
will read the editorials and think nothing happened. The Coalition and 
the newspapers will turn on the Liberals as they did on the 
Conservatives.
 
        No where in the world is there an example of a reduction in 
homicide or violence as a result of gun control. There are countries that 
had low rates before and after gun controls were introduced, countries 
that had high rates before and after, but none in which a high rate was 
lowered by controls. Since Canada will not be an exception, the public 
will feel the government has done nothing. By the next election they will 
have forgotten the new controls, because they still will not feel safe.
 
        The responsible gun owners, who are the victims of this ignorance 
and discrimination, will remember who did it to them. Perhaps this 
government feels so secure in it majority that it can afford to turn ten 
to twenty percent of the population into implacable enemies, who will 
work against them on every occasion. That is what the Conservatives did.
 
        In analyzing public opinion, it is a mistake to confuse wishful 
thinking with strongly held opinions. The general public will not 
remember new gun controls at the next election, but gun owners will. In 
Quebec, gun owners have a slogan, it is stamped on our license plates, Je 
me souviens, I remember. Do you remember? I remember.
 
 
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