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They said what?
Aug. 14th, 2013 09:02 amI have a friend who is otherwise very sane and sensible, but has a blind spot about his guns. Anyway, he pulled me into a discussion about this survey from the website PoliceOne which he, and some of his friends were using to go 'aha! Police don't like gun laws!'...
I didn't have a lot to say except ask any sample of cops similar questions and I think you could write the answers ahead of time somewhat like Eurovision voting. My father was similar. If somebody got arrested for something they were guilty. They had to be otherwise they wouldn't have been arrested.
Anyway, two things struck me. Firstly the sample size. 15000. That's a big sample. Second, lack of cross tabs and contextual data. Hmm.... so this is almost certainly an online poll of their readers. Now that doesn't necessarily relegate this to the status of an election in Zimbabwe but we're in a similar bit of territory I think.
What really blew my f'king mind was that 80% of the respondents thought that an armed civilian could have helped reduce casualties at Aurora or Newtown. Now, I might, if I was being charitable give you Newtown, possibly, but Aurora? You wanted an armed civilian returning fire in a dark cinema where a person in body armor had released smoke grenades? YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!
That was before I found that a plurality of the respondents felt that increasing violence in society was down to parenting and a breakdown in the family.
I didn't have a lot to say except ask any sample of cops similar questions and I think you could write the answers ahead of time somewhat like Eurovision voting. My father was similar. If somebody got arrested for something they were guilty. They had to be otherwise they wouldn't have been arrested.
Anyway, two things struck me. Firstly the sample size. 15000. That's a big sample. Second, lack of cross tabs and contextual data. Hmm.... so this is almost certainly an online poll of their readers. Now that doesn't necessarily relegate this to the status of an election in Zimbabwe but we're in a similar bit of territory I think.
What really blew my f'king mind was that 80% of the respondents thought that an armed civilian could have helped reduce casualties at Aurora or Newtown. Now, I might, if I was being charitable give you Newtown, possibly, but Aurora? You wanted an armed civilian returning fire in a dark cinema where a person in body armor had released smoke grenades? YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS!
That was before I found that a plurality of the respondents felt that increasing violence in society was down to parenting and a breakdown in the family.
