Logic and communication

One of the blessing of Thanksgiving is the opportunity to share long open conversations with old friends and families.  Full with appreciation of good food and good company, there is a nice generosity of spirit which encourages interesting, clever and witty conversations.  

Conversations which keep you thinking long after the meals are cleared and everyone has returned to their roosts and their routines.

Many such free flowing conversations on complex matters often center around communication specificity.  What exactly is meant or intended?  What is the definition of the word being used?  The concept being bandied?  Such exchanges are always useful because they help both speaker and listener refine what they are thinking.  Clarification is nine tenths of the issue it sometimes seems.

Lack of clarity of communication also intersects with logical inconsistency.  

Thinking about the general issue, it occurred to me that there might be an interesting poll to be done consisting of two statements which are functionally equivalent but expressed differently.

What might the results be were we to ask a random sample of 1,000 people:

Do you support banning all private gun ownership in America?

No context, no frame, no slant, no background.  Just do you support such a ban?

Then polling a separate 1,000 people.  This time the question would be:

Do you support restricting gun ownership to only the government?

Functionally these questions amount to the same thing.  No private ownership of guns and guns use restricted to the government and its authorized agents.

If you read this as an exercise in logic, the answers should be the exact mirror inverse.  If 35% support an absolute ban on private gun ownership, then 65% should be in support of only the government owning guns.  

But I don't think that is what we would find.  Regardless of what the empirical results might actually be, my guestimate would be that perhaps as many as 25% might wish to ban private gun ownership outright.  I also suspect that the percentage comfortable with all gun ownership being restricted to the government and its agents is far less than the logically implied 75%.  

I suspect 25% might support a ban on private ownership but that probably less than 10% would support only the government owning guns.

This is not about what might a specifically desirable policy.  This is about logic and communication.  Perhaps I am wrong but even when the questions logically consistent with one another, I suspect that people would not understand them to be so and would provide responses which would be at dramatic odds.