New PoliceOne's Gun Policy & Law Enforcement Survey: Police and their views on gun control

The new PoliceOne.com survey of police and their views on gun control is available here (article is here).  PoliceOne has about 450,000 members when the survey was done.  Here is information on previous surveys as well as a piece that I wrote for the WSJ.com.

A full 86 percent feel that casualties would have been reduced or avoided in recent tragedies like Newtown and Aurora if a legally-armed citizen was present (casualties reduced: 80 percent; avoided altogether: 60 percent). . . .
In addition, the survey asked, “On a scale of one to five — one being low and five being high — how important do you think legally-armed citizens are to reducing crime rates overall?”
Three quarters of you (75 percent) answered either four or five, with more than 50 percent answering five. . . .

I find myself in virtually complete agreement with the police in answering this survey.  I am not a big fan of open carry, but I am of concealed handguns.  I agree with them on the efficacy of gun buybacks, bans on ammunition magazines that hold more 10 rounds, national databases on gun ownership, and background checks.  

The answers to question #20 are extremely important: 77 percent of officers think that private gun ownership is either extremely or very important in reducing crime.  

Question #19 shows 91 percent support right-to-carry concealed carry with a background check.

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ACLU understands that the bill before the Senate next week is essentially a gun registration system

Harry Ried's bill that will be before the Senate this next week reads in part:

. . . shall include a provision requiring a record of transaction of any transfer that occurred between an unlicensed transferor and unlicensed transferee accordance with paragraph . . . .

A top lobbyist for the ACLU describes the bill to the Daily Caller this way:

“The first is that it treats the records for private purchases very differently than purchases made through licensed sellers. Under existing law, most information regarding an approved purchase is destroyed within 24 hours when a licensed seller does a [National Instant Criminal Background Check System] check now,” Calabrese said, “and almost all of it is destroyed within 90 days.” 

Calabrese wouldn’t characterize the current legislation’s record-keeping provision as a “national gun registry” — which the White House has denied pursuing — but he did say that such a registry could be “a second step.” . . .

The point is that over time the bill will record a larger and larger percentage of who owns guns in America.  It will be a gradual gun registration bill.  As the ACLU lobbyist warns:

“[U]nfortunately, we have seen in the past that the creation of these types of records leads sometimes to the creation of government databases and collections of personal information on all of us,” Calabrese warned. “That’s not an inevitable result, but we have seen that happen in the past, certainly.”
“As we’ve seen with many large government databases, if you build it, they will come.” . . . 

He comes to the same conclusion that I have come to reading the bill.

“Contrast this with what the existing [Reid] legislation says, which is simply that a record has to be kept of a private transfer,” Calabrese highlighted, “and it doesn’t have any of the protections that we have in current law for existing licensees.” . . . 

Yet, Obama denies that the bill involves registration:

"We're not proposing a gun registration system; we're proposing background checks for criminals," he said Wednesday in Denver. . . .

Though his own Justice Department claims that background checks won't work without registration.

the NRA says the memo proves that the administration “believes that a gun ban will not work without mandatory gun confiscation” and thinks universal background checks “won't work without requiring national gun registration,” according to the AP. . . .

The problem with this information is that it means the polls on background checks are pretty useless.  91 percent may claim that they are in favor of some idealized version of background checks (partly because of the false claims the president has made about 40 percent of gun sales being made without background checks and 2 million prohibited people supposedly being denied from buying guns because of background checks), but how many people support gun registration?  Some news stories note: "Opponents says they fear that universal background checks will eventually lead to gun registration."  But that is wrong.  You don't have to wait for eventually.  The would begin the registration process immediately.

Of course, registration could never lead to confiscation of guns in the US, right?  Well, it has already done so in California.

Anyone who wanted to keep one of the named firearms must have owned it prior to June 1, 1989, and had to register it by March 30, 1992. Registration gave the state a list of owners. . . .  

In August 1998, however, a California appellate court held the Attorney General could not legally allow the gun owners to register their weapons after the March 1992 deadline. That ruling came after many owners had already identified themselves by registering late. The Attorney General had led the law- fearing lambs into a trap: citizens had voluntarily informed the state that they were felons. . . .  

Then California lawmakers passed SB 23. On January 1, 2000, any Californian who possesses a magazine-fed centerfire rifle or carbine may be guilty of a felony. The 1989 law banned weapons only by their names -- the 1999 law bans all such firearms by their features (e.g. pistol grip, thumbhole stock, flash suppressor). . . .

Other examples of registration being used to confiscate guns include:

(1921) New Zealand, registration of revolvers required -- ownership allowed in the name of personal defense. In 1974, this list was used to confiscate all revolvers.
(1921) The United Kingdom instituted handgun registration. About every 10 years or so, they further restrict what can be owned and use the registration rolls to collect what is illegal.
(1967) In New York City, a registration system enacted for long guns was used in the early 1990s to confiscate lawfully owned semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The New York City Council banned firearms that had been classified by the city as "assault weapons."
(1989) California revoked a grace period for the registration of certain rifles (SKS Sporters) and prohibited certain semiautomatic long-rifles and pistols. Upon the death of the owner, they are either to be surrendered or moved out of state.
(1990) Chicago enacted registration of long guns and used that same registration to confiscate semi-auto long guns.
(1995) Canada prohibited previously legal and registered small-caliber handguns. The guns are to be forfeited upon death of the owner with no compensation to the estate.
(1996) Australia banned most semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic and pump shotguns, then used its list of registered semi-auto hunting rifles to confiscate all those weapons. . . .

Some polling data is available here.

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Background check bill passed out of Senate Judiciary Committee has slim chance of passing full Senate

From Politico:

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved a Democratic bill calling for background checks on all gun sales, which could potentially lead to the biggest change in U.S. gun laws in years. 

But the likelihood of the full Senate approving such a bill is slim because of objections from Republicans. 

The bill was approved on a 10-8 party-line vote and mandates background checks on all gun purchases and sales, including private transactions. State governments will also be able to tap into a national criminal background check system. . . . 

Without such Republican support, Democrats from conservative states are unlikely to sign on to the measure. Coburn objected to the idea that permanent records being kept of gun purchases. . . .

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Issues with a Washington Post Poll that claims: "77 percent of Maryland residents who bought a gun in the past 10 years say they went through a background check"

According to the Washington Post article, 81% say that they bought a gun at a traditional gun store, but fewer, 77 percent, say that they had a background check.  Even if only half bought their guns through dealers at gun shows (4.5 percent and that is undoubtedly extremely conservative since my understanding is that the gun shows in Maryland don't even let you have a table unless you are a registered dealer), that leaves a big gap between people buying from places where we would know that they would have to have background checks and those who say that they have had a check.  81% + 4.5% would imply at least 85.5% would be in places where they would have for sure had checks, and presumably even a couple of the 10 percent who bought the guns elsewhere would have had to get checks.

From the Washington Post story:

In the new poll, 77 percent of Maryland residents who bought a gun in the past 10 years say they went through a background check; 21 percent say they did not. (Given the rarity of Marylanders purchasing guns, there is a sizable 11.5 percentage point error margin for the results among this group.)
The vast majority of buyers — 81 percent — say they made their purchase at a traditional gun store rather than a gun show (9 percent) or somewhere else (10 percent). The poll finds little correlation between location of purchase and undergoing a background check. . . .

UPDATE: Glenn Kessler was nice enough to email back and forth with me on this issue.  The WP pollster responded this way:

Your researcher’s intuition is correct, but I think slicing up the data this finely goes a little beyond the capabilities of the survey. Just over 100 gun buyers were interviewed, only 8 of whom bought from a gun show. I think the survey alone is not sufficient to conclude that there’s widespread shirking of background checks at places where they are required.    
The underlying notion is correct—some survey respondents report buying guns from traditional gun stores without background checks, and gun show and private sales don’t account for the 21 percent who report no background check. As we note in the article, “it’s not clear the people  who say they didn’t undergo background checks broke the law. The survey asked about gun buying experiences over a 10-year period, so respondent recall may be an issue. The point precision is also not exact, given the relatively small number of Marylanders who say they have purchased a gun in the past decade.”    
We are working to understand these numbers deeper, and will hopefully understand better any possible issues with recall or exemptions (law enforcement officers and military/vets are exempted from some background checks). 

This is how I responded:

Thanks very much, Glenn, though I don't think that answers my question.  I am not so much trying to get into what individual categories are as seeing whether the two totals should be somewhat roughly the same.  I am really just saying that the number of purchases through FFLs has to be significantly above 81%.  I was just trying to motivate with a simple example how much it has to be above 81%, not that I was trying to breakdown the components.  Either these stores or places didn't have checks and broke the law or people didn't understand that they were having checks done or after up to 10 years they don't really remember whether a check was done.  I have a hard time believing that the first option is true.  The results indicate to me that they are significantly biased towards making the number of sales without background checks look larger than they are. Do I have permission to share this response?  Thank you very much. 

My biggest concern about the survey is how long of a period that people are asked about purchasing guns over.

I know that shorter time period reduces sample size a lot, but my biggest concern is the 10 year time window.  All the surveys that I have been involved with indicates to me that the error rate in answers increases dramatically once you go back more than one year (possibly like what we were discussing below).  If you ask people about more than a year you will start getting them including purchases outside that window and you will also tend to get more unusual events simply because people are more likely to quickly recall very unusual events when they are suddenly asked about them.

One obvious example involves defensive gun uses.  The bigger the window that you ask people about the greater the share of defensive uses will involve people firing their gun. 

In the case of purchases, the buying of a gun is probably a much more memorable event than whether there was a background check.  People will remember the purchases, but not remember whether there was a background check that went along with it.

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Note on New Zealand's long gun registry

Charles Cooke has this useful note:

New Zealand’s long-gun-registry experiment ended in failure, too. By the early 1980s, New Zealand’s National Police pleaded with that country’s parliament to abandon the system, having watched ballooning budgets lead only to a lot of wasted time and to the expansion of a system that, frankly, didn’t do anything useful. In 1983, parliament, conceding that criminals are unlikely to leave registered guns at the scenes of their crimes, complied. . . .

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