KSL article: Districts can't ask which teachers carry

[utbagpiper]

KSL (in Salt Lake City, Utah) is running an article today about the fact that in Utah school districts cannot even ask which teachers are carrying guns pursuant to a permit to carry. The article is actually pretty even handed.

It includes a poll at the bottom about how you feel about teachers being armed. They've provided three choices with the following results currently:

Concerned, Guns don't belong: 12% 517 votes
Comforted, Armed teachers provide some extra protections: 81% 3598 votes
Indifferent, I don't care either way: 7% 325 votes

It would be nice to push this one to over 90% who don't oppose armed teachers.

Charles

 

[b0neZ]

Thanks for that. Voted. Still at 81%.

Sent from my SM-N920V using Tapatalk

 

[Have Gun - Will Carry]

I just voted on that, too. Still at 81%...

 

[utbagpiper]

Can someone explain why people vote "I don't care" in an online poll? It's 325 votes in this one. If I didn't care, I wouldn't vote at all and would just ignore the poll. I don't get it.

I'm kind of with you on this one. In some cases, the cynic in me sometimes wonders if the 3rd (or 4th or 5th) options are not included by the media to deliberately water down the results. When I see four or more possible answers to polls, with several of them having only minor differences, I figure someone is trying to obscure the expected results of the poll by spreading the responses among multiple answers.

I realized this poll does have an interesting feature. Once you respond, you can click on the poll to see the demographic spread of responses. It will ask you to input your age and gender, and then probably using the IP address of each respondent, it shows the breakdown of answers by age/gender, as well as by geographic region including individual US States, and nations around the world. The number of responses from outside Utah and the US are small enough as to be easily swayed. And of course self-selected responses rather than randomly selected pools are not statistically meaningful anyway. But it is interesting to look at where those who have some interest in reading a Utah based media site come down on this issue.

Charles

 

[MAC702]

Can someone explain why people vote "I don't care" in an online poll? It's 325 votes in this one. If I didn't care, I wouldn't vote at all and would just ignore the poll. I don't get it.

It is perfectly valid to state that you don't have a preference and be counted as such in a poll. Indeed, to not vote would skew the statistics (Did he not care, or was he not polled?) It is vital information to the data gatherers to know what percentage of those polled have no preference on that question.

Nevada has "None of the Above" in our elections!