Maybe Phil Baruth should have stuck to his guns.
Poll results released Friday by the Castleton Polling Institute show that a majority of Vermonters support a host of gun-control measures proposed at the state and federal level — including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
According to the poll results, half of all Vermonters have a gun in their households, and most people surveyed said they favor stricter controls on the sale and use of firearms.
Among the findings:
- 84 percent favor requiring strict reporting from mental-health professionals to the National Instant Background Check System (NICS).
- 75 percent favor closing the so-called “gun show loophole.”
- 66 percent favor banning the sale of high-capacity ammunition magazines.
- 61 percent favor banning further sale of assault weapons.
- 54 percent favor making it illegal to own an assault rifle.
Even among gun owners, there’s majority support for gun-control measures: 88 percent of Vermont gun owners surveyed favor requiring mental health professionals to report NICS; 71 percent back closing the gun show loophole; and 55 percent favor banning the sale of high-capacity ammo clips. Also, 50 percent of gun owners favor banning further sales of assault weapons. On the question of making it illegal to own assault weapons, though, only 40 percent of gun owners favored that.
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The links to Castleton’s data are broken.
As a former research interviewer, I can say with certainty this is an unscientific survey with skewed results. For example, their sample includes 56.6% females (subtracting the three not identified by gender) while census data confirms only 50.7% of Vermonters are female. That’s almost an extra six percent!
While this alone only slightly skews the results, it points to the likeliness of a larger problem in their data collection: they were unable to complete interviews with a good random sample that’s representative of the population. Professional polling companies employ “refusal converters” – advanced interviewers skilled at convincing those who refused (i.e. hung up the phone) to reconsider participating in the poll. This ensures the randomly selected sample provides an accurate representation (because if they only interviewed people who willingly do phone surveys, that skews the results toward the sorts of people who like surveys).
The demographic failures of this survey such as the heavy female representation make me question their lack of sufficient refusal conversion and what other unprofessional oversights or methods may have occurred. It’s very upsetting that news outlets like WCAX and Seven Days are simply repeating these misrepresentative data rather than asking better questions about methodology.
While it shouldn’t be the case, polls like these can influence our legislators. Therefore Seven Days’s lack of questioning is reckless toward our constitutional rights. I can only hope for better reporting, and better polling, in the future.