Virginia Gun Owners Forum - VGOF

Survey on Self-Defense Legislation for 2012 Virgina General Assembly

I've put together a survey on possible bills for the 2012 General Assembly session on self defense.

It's a "ranking" survey, which will capture a much deeper snapshot of what is wanted than a simple "pick your one favorite" format.

Seems fairly easy to use, click the link, drag each of the ideas over to the right side of the page, ranking them in the order you prefer.

Once you're done, you must click the "Submit Answers" button at the bottom of the page.

I'm posting this simultaneously on OCDO (Virginia), VaGunTrader and VaGunForum. Feel free to spread the link to the survey to any venues (e-mail, forums, websites, legislators) where you genuinely believe it will be welcome. Obviously we don't want to SPAM.

The results link is displayed after you complete the survey.

TFred

Link text:

http://kwiksurveys.com?u=Virginia2012

While I can appreciate what you are trying to do, I would like to offer a couple of suggestions. When referencing existing laws, you may want to give a brief synopsis of the law and not just the statue number. Also, I did not "vote" for any of the CHP offerings, however, if you had an option for Constitutional Carry, I would have put that at the top of the list.

interesting survey and results.
70 responses so far.

Clear top five preferences are:
Castle Doctrine - free from criminal and civil liability
Preempt ALL of state government like 15.2-915
Penalize all violations of 15.2-915 preemption
Parking Lot Law - you may lock a gun in a vehicle
Privatize CHP information at ALL sources

Clear bottom five preferences are:
Subdivisions - allow for safe shooting in or near
Remove VSP background on purchases, use Feds
Remove restrictions on barrel threads and mag capacity
Virginia firearms immune to Federal laws and regs
Remove hunting conflicts with self-defensive carry

Yarddawg wrote:While I can appreciate what you are trying to do, I would like to offer a couple of suggestions. When referencing existing laws, you may want to give a brief synopsis of the law and not just the statue number. Also, I did not "vote" for any of the CHP offerings, however, if you had an option for Constitutional Carry, I would have put that at the top of the list.

Appreciate the feedback. The web page I used for the survey offered no formatting ability for the answers for this particular type of question, so I was very limited in how well I could describe each choice. If the text got too long, it destroyed the ability to drag from left to right, making the process very much more difficult to follow.

As for the CC... it was a call I made to not include it. My goal was to include only legislation that had a reasonable chance to pass this year. Many people want this, myself included, but I just don't believe we are quite to a point where such legislation stands a legitimate chance of passage. Yet <-- Key Word!!

TFred

Here's an update on the survey. Copied from my post on OCDO.

Here is a snapshot of the survey results so far. Much explanation below.



Even after only 3 days of data collection and 75 responses, I am very pleased with the results of this survey. Not even particularly because of how the votes have come in, but by the breadth of information one can learn from doing a little bit of studying on the overall picture.

As I stated in the introduction, the big deal with this survey is that it asks you to "rank" your preferences, which allows for a much deeper picture than a simple "pick your one favorite from a list." One analogy that I can think of to illustrate this is the NASCAR points race. (Although I'm not really particularly a NASCAR fan, I know a tiny bit about how the points race works.) If a different driver won every race, and that was the only result that "counted", you'd have a really big tie. But since you get points for every position you finish, you get a cumulative score over the season. If one driver came in 2nd or 3rd EVERY race, and never won, he would probably win the points race by a long shot.

Same deal here, only with bills. Some of the easy pickings we can deduce so far is this:

1. Castle Doctrine is very important to people. As often noted, Virginia does already have a very good case history for castle doctrine protection. I take these results to mean that either people still don't understand that, or perhaps they really feel better about being able to read it in the Code of Virginia for themselves. Note: The second place bill actually got one more First place vote, but the overall concern represented by the lower position votes pushed this bill to the top.

2. Preemption (15.2-915) is big. Coming in 2nd and 5th were the two bills adding preemption to ALL state government and adding penalties for localities that violate it.

Filling out the top 5 were the Parking Lot Bill and Privatizing CHP information, no coincidence that all these top-5 issues get a lot of discussion.

Surprisingly low (to me at least), the idea to eliminate the VSP background check and use the Feds check instead came in next to last. I guess this means that the VSP program is not perceived to be very much of a problem.

Also of interest is the next to last column, Total Votes, which at the lower end reveals what issues are simply not cared about by many people. The highest there was for the Castle Doctrine: 68 out of the 75 respondents included Castle Doctrine somewhere in their list of important bills. Compare to only 47 out of the 75 voting for the Subdivision bill as any concern at all.

For those interested, a little bit about how these final scores and rankings were calculated. Each "vote" was assigned a weighted value, the inverse of the ranked position. Each #1 vote counted 18 points, #2 was 17 points, all the way down to the last vote, #18, which received 1 point. Add them all up, then divide that by the highest possible value (If that bill had received #1 votes from ALL the responses), and you get a percentage. The higher the percentage, the closer you are to EVERYONE voting that bill as their #1 issue.

To sum it up... If you participated, THANK YOU! I think these are very interesting results, and I plan to leave the survey up for some time yet. I think if we can get a bigger sample, those in positions to lobby will have a very useful bit of information at their disposal.

As before, please feel free to spread the link around to any outlets that will find it of interest.

http://kwiksurveys.com?u=Virginia2012

TFred

I figured out how to get the % results page without having to vote again.
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/results-overview.php?surveyID=ONIHIG_f9991482&mode=4
Can you publish the link to see the ranking page of results like the one you posted? Assuming, of course, it's possible to view it without being the poll owner.
Looking at the percentages is not very informative and I'd like to follow the progress of this.
Thanks in Advance.

AlanM wrote:I figured out how to get the % results page without having to vote again.
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/results-overview.php?surveyID=ONIHIG_f9991482&mode=4
Can you publish the link to see the ranking page of results like the one you posted? Assuming, of course, it's possible to view it without being the poll owner.
Looking at the percentages is not very informative and I'd like to follow the progress of this.
Thanks in Advance.

Unfortunately, the ranked results I posted above was the output of some additional number crunching with Excel. The web page that provides the survey does not do that. I had to take the raw numbers (which are not publicly available) and do the math I described in the process description and sort the results to get the final rankings.

No worries, I will definitely be providing additional updates as the data points increase, and at the end, whenever that may be.

TFred