Eugene Volokh on the 15,000 Police Officer Poll

[Southwest Chuck]

Interesting....

http://www.volokh.com/2013/04/11/police-officer-survey-showing-overwhelming-opposition-to-various-gun-restrictions/

[Lugiahua]

that's a really weak argument...what's the percentage of responses compared to the population in most national survey? usually less than .01%

[Wherryj]

It is not a weak argument, because there is a huge difference:

The 4% of officers who CHOSE to take the survey are self-selected. They take they survey because they want to. This raises the danger that they self-selected because they have a particular interest in the topic of the survey. It's like taking a poll here on Calguns: If you asked Calguns members whether they're in favor of stronger background checks for gun purchases, you would probably get 10% yes, 90% no. That's because the people who participate in Calguns are self-selected.

On the other hand, the typical political poll or survey is randomly selected: the polling firm choses random people, and hopefully gets a sample that's representative of the population as a whole. The better polling firms even go and correct for known biases in reachability ... for example younger people more often have only cellphones, or more often don't pick up the phone, and are therefore harder to reach. If you take the same survey on stronger background checks among the population as a whole (which has been done recently, by several polling firms), you will find that 80% to 90% of the population supports them.

All this may be true, but if you live in a Constitutional Republic, how many people support restricting an innate right has absolutely no bearing on anything.