The anti-gunners have actually observed that pro-gun folks write their legislators more, donate more money and attend more events in support of the 2ndA than do those who oppose guns. Bloomberg responded by creating Everytown and adopting Moms Demand Action, to be One-Man money/media mill. They created the March for Our Lives movement with money & media as well.
This survey is very likely an effort to use our tendency to respond beyond mere Friend/Like clicks against us by creating a self-selected pool of pro-2ndA respondents for future survey use. These "gun violence research centers" take $$$ from Bloomberg, Soros, etc., laundered for academic purity through foundations (Joyce, MacArthur, etc.) with avowed anti-gun agendas, to pump tons of *research* out while decrying the lack of federal funding for gun research.
Harvard's lead researcher Hemenway has been publishing for decades
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/ with 100+ papers since 1992 - twice that number from his underlings. They do a survey and crank papers out for years. Many papers from students and residents are so poor that editors send them to me for rejection so other academics don't have to sully their hands.
I signed up for the survey system - why not? We're damned if we do or don't. The top schools might suppress and obfuscate outcomes that don't fit their narrative but they don't out-and-out lie like the no-name schools - they have a reputation. In science, if you have a hypothesis about how
this causes
that, you do a study and if
this *doesn't* cause
that its called "negative findings" and is usually not publishable - anyone can come up with a BS hypothesis and be wrong so who cares?
In the anti-gun research space, I've seen the term "negative findings" used when the study doesn't indict guns. No anti-gun conclusions means no publication, no funding. But with the advent of virtual medical journals - no print copy sent out monthly as the official journal of some actual dues-paying biomedical researchers that have meetings, committees, etc. - the tripe I reject shows up on some so-called Global Open online journal within a few months. Even if total crap - such a "publication" is evidence an academic is at least right-minded, in the anti-gun sense, to their other anti-gun peers.
Surveys that address who we are and what we think are pretty common. They are used to confirm to some "majority" that they are indeed with the majority. Liberals/progressives are smart enough to know the majority isn't always "right" but when they
know they are right, it's comforting and reinforcing to know they are in the majority. The *majority* favor Universal Background Checks by some 80-90%, yet when UBCs pass a state referendum, it's usually by a bare margin. So polls do not reflect reality (or elections.) Have you ever, for even a moment, thought that as less than 1/2 of US households and residents own guns, that maybe gun ownership is wrong? Never. But the liberal/progressive mindset equates majority with "right" and needs that reassurance.
Now surveys are being used as Alinsky's Rules for Radicals #13 intends: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Identify gun owners as the deviant element, separate them from American mainstream culture to be ostracised not by race, creed or color, but by ideology. Segment gun owners, do the market research, and see which will vote for candidates with "common sense" gun law messages, like in VA, where Bloomberg outspent NRA 8-to-1. When VA gun owners realize their non-compliance with new laws would make them felons, they'll just be astonished that they were the targets rather than those other bad apples that shouldn't have guns.
But - I'm not saying anything you don't know...just ranting ;-)