colt--
if what you said about conservatives not being vociferous about polling were true...surely the 2004 election would have been a surprising upset by the president. Everyone should therefore have predicted Kerry to be the winner and the president would have been a surprise victory...
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/special/polls/index.html
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/01/politics/main652662.shtml
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/PollVault/story?id=193178
but in fact most polls, even beyond these, showed bush in the lead by 1-2 points in the weeks before the election. He actually won by 3 points. Well within the margin of error. At least as far as elections go, it would appear as though conservatives have no trouble reporting their opinions to the national telephone polls. (The exit polls, however, were a different story =)
Spot77--
i don't think it's fair to summarily reject polling as a way of understanding the underlying population. YES many polls can be done in a biased way to forward an agenda. And many polls can be done in an unbiased way that truly represent the underlying population within a margin of error. I'm not about to say, "The government did it; it MUST be bad".
Also what I meant by "CONTROLS" in my previous post was
not gun controls but experimental controls. Let's take an absurd statement. "Living in an igloo prevents heart attacks."
If you did an unbiased random poll in North America and looked at whether people lived in an igloo and whether they had a heart attack you would ACTUALLY find that people who lived in an igloo died of heart attacks far less than people who don't live in igloos. NO JOKE!
This is where most of the gun articles would stop and then like to make a causal statement, "Living in non-ice houses cause heart attacks. GLOBAL WARMING WILL CAUSE HEART ATTACKS!" "BAN DRY WALL!!!! You're 43 times more likely to die if you own a heater" Sadly absurdity like this lies on BOTH sides of the divide.
In fact, living in an igloo makes you most likely to be an Inuit/Eskimo. Inuit/Eskimos tend to have a diet rich in fish. Fish tend to be rich in Omega-three fatty acids. A large amount of omega three fatty acids causes your body to synthesize more of certain types of prostaglandins. The specific types of prostaglandins produced prevents your platelets from clogging your coronary arteries which actually causes the heart attack. Subsequent studies showed that giving people eicosapentaenoic acid (an omega-three) from fish, flax seeds, walnuts etc all helped prevent heart attacks through their inhibition of platelets.
Why the hell am I still talking about Inuits? It's just to illustrate the point that properly controlling an experiment and figuring out why things are happening goes a lot further than making causal claims from coincidental or association data. So when people say, "Crime went up 3x in DC since banning guns" or "since banning guns, violent crime in Britain is down" or any other crap is lame since it doesn't actually MEAN anything. You have to do a lot of work to show that the fundamental reason as to why crime went up in DC is that guns were banned. There is certainly a sensible hypothesis there, but it requires a lot of work to make it a theory. A lot of "controls" have to be done and I'm not talking about the gun variety.
As far as attacking the national crime poll because the government did it. You'd better be able to show in some way that the poll changed fundamentally since 1997 in order to show a downward trend in the population. Are people since 1997 more and more afraid to report the crime to the national poll causing the decreasing trend? Is the poll getting more and more corrupt on a yearly basis?
Those are possible explanations...but you'd have to show me where that is true...I'm not the conspiracy type...probably violent crime has decreased in England and even more probably it has NOTHING to do with guns being banned or not.
Of course if I lived in Washington DC NOW I sure as hell would want a gun, controlled experiment or not!
