Returning now to the 2008 Gallup Poll, the fact that support for stricter gun laws has declined since 9/11 is interesting and perhaps somewhat indicative. But the underlying poll question is worthless: We don't know what people think existing gun laws are, and we have ample evidence that many--if not most--people have no accurate idea what they are.

So the fact that X percent generally feel gun laws are restrictive enough while Y percent think they should be more restrictive tells us nothing about what laws Americans actually want.

In contrast, questions about specific law proposals can be revealing in themselves and for what they imply more generally.

The fact that 68 percent in the Gallup poll now oppose banning handguns is especially meaningful, since a) banning handguns is the immediate goal of the anti-gun movement; and b) three decades ago American opinion was almost equally divided for and against handgun bans.

Gallup and other poll results on how many Americans own guns are not just worthless but actually misleading. We have firearms production and importation figures. Those are actual figures reflecting the existence of actual guns.

They indicate that Americans currently own more than 290 million guns. This is wildly inconsistent with the poll result that only one-third of Americans own guns. The low poll figure on gun ownership is very questionable, in an era where gun ownership is very controversial. All that these polls show is that when a stranger asks Americans whether they own firearms only one-third will admit it.

Many years of debate over proposals to ban handguns and other kinds of firearms--and place onerous new conditions on all guns--may induce gun owners to lie to strangers inquiring about household possession of firearms.

Moreover, for decades much of the mass media has indulged in the habit of stigmatizing firearms and firearms ownership, so that many gun owners might come to think of their weapon as a sort of guilty secret, like a pornography collection or a cache of marijuana, to be denied and lied about rather than openly acknowledged.

Whatever the reasons may be, it is clear that when asked by pollsters, many, many Americans falsely deny owning guns. For instance, in an early 1994 survey, respondent answers showed that 53 percent of American households contained a firearm. Yet a survey taken later in that same year found that only 34 percent did.