Are the CBS and Voter News Service polls accurately reflecting how gun ownership rates vary across states?
Lott completely fails to address any of the criticisms of his use of these surveys. For details, see here. In a later paper on safe storage laws [32] Lott and Whitley do not use these exit polls. Instead they use GSS surveys to measure how gun ownership changes as a result of a state passing a safe storage law. Using these polls they find that gun ownership declined by one percentage point per year in the states with the laws and argue that the laws caused increases in crime rates. Lott does not explain why, after stoutly defending his use of the exit polls to measure changes in gun ownership at the state level he abandoned them for his later paper. One possible explanation is that the exit polls say the opposite thing to the GSS surveys.
