A new poll suggests Americans who say they oppose “stricter gun control laws” might approve of the measures if asked instead about “stricter gun laws”.



The survey, which was released by Quinnipiac University, shows that when asked if they would support or oppose “stricter gun control laws” in the US, the result was 46% in favour and 51% against.

When the word “control” was dropped from the proposition, however, the result was reversed, with 52% saying they would support the proposition and 45% opposing it.



Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll, said that to him it implied people were interpreting “gun laws” as generic safeguards such as background checks, while “gun control” was a more absolute term which carried the implication of guns being fully taken away.



“I think what this tells us is that Americans are fine with background checks and entertaining other ways to make the country safer, but when it comes to taking their guns away, ‘gun control’ means taking the guns away and they’re not buying that,” Malloy said.



Malloy did say, however, that the results were not particularly dramatic. When you factor in the fact that Quinnipiac’s initial sample of 1,144 people had to be split in half so that they could be asked the two different questions, the result only barely escapes the margin of error. “It’s almost a tie,” Malloy admitted.



But nonetheless, Malloy stood by the result as being both statistically significant and meaningful. “This is a very thorough survey,” he said. “You want to stand by your numbers, so I don’t believe [the result is an outlier].”



Michael Traugott, a professor at the department of political science at the University of Michigan, said that these kind of question-wording experiments to see how changes in phrasing affect attitudes were “not unusual”.



“It’s fairly common to conduct question-wording experiments to see how particular words or phrases affect attitudes,” Traugott said, though he added that he felt the result here was “pretty minor”.