8 ms·

Journalists’ Addresses Posted In Revenge For Posting Of Gun Permit Owners

64 points by emeraldd 14y ago

deltaepsilon 14y ago
I live in Utah, where most people own guns and a large group, myself included, have concealed carry permits. All interactions with strangers happen in that context, and we do ok. We've had some shootings. They're s seen as a reminder that individuals should carry more, not less.
- emeraldd 14y ago
  "An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life." -- Robert A. Heinlein http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertahe100989.html http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertahe100989.h...
  - deltaepsilon 14y ago
    I've heard this quote a lot. Carrying a loaded weapon is a MASSIVE responsibility. It's really scary at first, but you can learn to do it effectively and safely with enough training. The training is critical.
    - spamizbad 14y ago
      A responsibility I'm not sure all (even law-abiding) adults are capable of handling. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pizza-shooter-claims-stand-ground-article-1.1225019 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pizza-shooter-claim... Customer complains about Pizza taking too long. Gets in verbal altercation with armed gentleman. Result: shots fired. Thankfully no deaths.
      - sarvinc 14y ago
        Surely not all adults are capable of handling the responsibility of several things; debt, firearms, a vehicle, alcohol etc. I don't want to live in a place where this is a justification for anything.
  - abolibibelot 14y ago
    Said the man who was a fierce proponent of the Vietnam war without setting foot there.
  - dsr_ 14y ago
    An armed society is a scared society. If you think fear is better than freedom, I'm very sorry for you. Thought experiment: a customer comes to your office to talk about your product. He's wearing a gun on his belt, and no uniform. Are you more or less comfortable telling him that you won't implement the feature that he says he wants?
    - cema 14y ago
      Does not have to be about fear, can be about respect. Can also be about less fear (the gun being a great equalizer): for example, a frail person can be less afraid of punks. As far as your example, I am not quite sure what to make of it. Does not even sound like a good joke, sorry.
ISL 14y ago
When concealed-carry permit addresses were published by a journalist in our town in 2007, people who had fled abusive relationships were immediately forced to move. http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/108418 http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/108418 Transparent government is a net positive, but as with everything, we have to be careful with the consequences of our actions.
- jrogers65 14y ago
  Personally, I think that this has less to do with having a transparent than it does with personal privacy. I think that the latter trumps the former. Government is supposed to be open because everybody funds it through taxes. A private individual should have the freedom to remain private if they so choose.
freehunter 14y ago
I don't currently own any guns and have none registered to my name, but if gun owners were labelled similarly to sex offenders on a publicly searchable map like in the article, I would go out of my way to get put on that map. I don't shy from a gun; I hunt and target shoot using my family and friends' guns. I just don't own any due to not having a reasonable case for owning one in my current living situation (I have roommates). What purpose would that map serve? The only thing I can think of is your easily-offended neighbors would avoid you and your house. Good. If you're going to get up in arms (so to speak) about private and legal gun ownership and knowing that I own a gun is going to change your opinion of me for the worse, I'd like to know that before I invest significant time into building a relationship with you as my neighbor. If you're going to assume I'm a criminal just because I own a gun, I want nothing to do with you. Another benefit I could see from this type of map is a convenient listing of addresses that burglars may tend to shy away from. No one wants to rob a house and find a gun in their face if there is a house right next door without weaponry. Do I want this information presented in this way? Not particularly. There's not much benefit to the average person in knowing where legally registered guns are kept, and potentially negative consequences if the neighborhood kids now know that your house has guns they could get a hold of. I strongly disagree with the intentions of the journalists in this case, and applaud the lawyer for his response in a vigilante justice sort of way.
- yozmsn 14y ago
  Great point about wanting to be on that list, while it's unlikely that a criminal would use such a map to check your house before trying to rob, he now knows who DOESN'T own a gun (legally) and is a good candidate for robbery.
- bayerian 14y ago
  What purpose would that map serve? The only thing I can think of is your easily-offended neighbors would avoid you and your house. I can think of a few other potential side effects: 1) Problems for your kids. "No, you can't go and play at Timothy's house, his parents have a gun". 2) Making your house a target for people who want to steal your guns. 3) Potentially being discovered and held against you by employers.
rikacomet 14y ago
err... eye for an eye, leaves the whole world blind, Anyone remembers that? this exposes both groups to a lot of risk, really a bad call I would say. A criminal can use the info to take revenge on a media personnel, or rob/hurt/murder/rape someone without a gun.
- jetti 14y ago
  "err... eye for an eye, leaves the whole world blind, Anyone remembers that?" It seems people have taken on a more Parker Brothers attitude: "Sorry! You get me I get you back". "A criminal can use the info to take revenge on a media personnel, or rob/hurt/murder/rape someone without a gun." Just because somebody isn't on that map doesn't mean they don't have a gun. All it means is that they just don't legally own a gun.
afterburner 14y ago
Well, fear probably increases gun ownership, so not a bad move from the pro-gun side...
FourthProtocol 14y ago
If we're going to play like kids anyways, then I think more interesting would be a map showing journalists with gun permits.
amolsarva 14y ago
The main argument, and a silly one, summarizing the outrage about the map is "now criminals can find guns to steal". This is very silly -- there are plenty of maps to use to find banks, gun stores, gasoline, fertilizer...or rich people's homes.
- bitcrusher 14y ago
  The security at Banks and Gun Stores at least, is significantly higher than that of a personal residence, so, it's NOT that silly. The main argument is that "outing" people in a collective way, as though they are 'sex offenders'( per the text ) is absurd and offensive.
- bonch 14y ago
  The argument I've seen is that this is very the kind of politically-driven privacy invasion that gun owners have feared about gun registration laws.
- delinka 14y ago
  The inverse of the list is a collection of targets that are "safe" to invade. Edit: added quotes. Some criminal will certainly, without thinking, decide these are safe targets. And statistically speaking, they'd probably be right more often than not. At the least, it's a great list of targets to avoid if you're planning to loot a neighborhood.
  - amolsarva 14y ago
    Not safe. They just don't have a registered gun. They have knives, security systems, gates, locks, police driving by. And the ones with guns may well be easy to invade. It happened to the mom of that killer last week. It's not a good argument but the gun fans do make it repeatedly.
  - cheald 14y ago
    Registration is generally not required for a shotgun, which is what is commonly recommended for home invasion defense. While there is certainly going to be an overlap between owners of registered handguns and owners of unregistered shotguns, "house is not on the map, no guns to worry about in there" is a false assumption.
sethbannon 14y ago
The comments on the TC piece are quite disturbing, even by Internet comment standards.
- jusben1369 14y ago
  Seriously. What the heck happened to TC? It was never the high point of debate on the web but it's struggling to rank much above local trashy mag comments. And so much for the quality improvement we'd receive when people had to use their real identities. Is the problem AOL piping a lot of traffic into their stories?
andrewdubinsky 14y ago
Can I get added to the list of gun owners please? Make a note that I am an expert marksman and I shoot to kill. Also, please add that I don't own anything worth trading your life for.
- jellicle 14y ago
  Hi, internet tough guy!
  - andrewdubinsky 14y ago
    I'm not a marksman, nor do I own a gun. Criminals should believe that I do so they will rob/rape/kill someone else instead of me.
- chez17 14y ago
  The fact that you get excited about killing another human shows you are not qualified to own a gun.
  - cema 14y ago
    Actually, it does not.
pdx 14y ago
That some random individual with a blog can harvest the addresses of every single registered gun owner with a freedom of information request is thought provoking to me. In the past, I had vague fears about what such lists could be used for, but my fears were always aimed toward the group that held civil control. Now I am struck with how easy it is for the $FANATICAL_CAUSE down the street to obtain such a list. Such freedom of information is dangerous. This inability for a government to avoid releasing large databases full of dangerous information to random people is frightening. Is this the way the world is heading? If so, I have some business ideas I need to start working on. Let me use the freedom of information act to obtain the database that maps license plates to names and addresses. Next time you accidentally cut somebody off in traffic, expect him to be waiting at your house when you get home, after visiting my website. Maybe he's already had a little visit with your family while he was waiting. Let me use the the freedom of information act to obtain the tax returns of every person in an area. We'll publish how much you make, where you work, and the names and ages of your children, so anybody who might be interested in such things can visit my website to do searches. After all, information should be free, right? The only thing that scares me more than my government having complete and total knowledge of my life, is for it to be accessible by any lunatic with a computer. That was a worry I didn't even have when I woke up this morning.
- cafard 14y ago
  About 35 years ago, someone acquired a list of all persons with a concealed carry license in New York City, and published it in a newspaper or magazine. It created a nine-days wonder and as far as I know has been forgotten ever since.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- jlarocco 14y ago
  IMO, there's not much difference between government employees and arbitrary members of the general public. It's a safe assumption that if the government is collecting personal information then random strangers will have access to it.
Torgo 14y ago
Stuff like this pretty much confirms the NRA's fears about gun registration. It didn't immediately result in gun confiscation or anything, but yeah--it's just used for registration today, but tomorrow it's used against you.
- amolsarva 14y ago
  The downside is you get embarrassed when someone makes a map. That's the NRA fear. (Edit: that's WHAT the NRA fear) Similar downside for...driver's licenses, passports, political contributions, subscriptions to magazines or any other database where it is useful to have records of who does what.
- technoslut 14y ago
  I don't like this but I don't understand how this deals with "NRA fear." Many NRA members are proud they have a gun. Like anyone else, they are eager to tell or show why like them.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    It's like the google real name debate in reverse. Some people are proud to identify with a group, so therefore we should out everybody, right?
JohnFromBuffalo 14y ago
I saw this coming from a mile away as soon as I saw the map go up yesterday. I think the real debate is mental health and deeper checks on those who are at higher risk of violence in the mental health community. The stigma also needs to be removed from our culture of such diseases so we as a culture can move beyond the gun debate and concentrate on those who lash out with violence. As a gun owner, I am both for stricter controls but its obvious that gun control only affects those who are legally looking to buy guns .. not the violent offenders in our culture.
crazygringo 14y ago
The thing that bothers me most is that people's addresses are a matter of public record, period. It's one thing to know someone has a gun license, or donated money to a political candidate, or owns a domain name. It's another thing to reveal where they live. Sometimes people move for a good reason, and don't want someone else to be able to find them. (Abuse cases, etc.) Other countries solve this by having ID numbers -- American SSN's are the closest. Those can be used in official documents, etc. Whereas in the US, domain names and other licenses are assigned to someone with a particular name, at a particular address, since SSN's aren't supposed to be used as general-purpose ID numbers, and what other option do you have?
norswap 14y ago
Live by the sword, die by the sword.

64 points by emeraldd 14y ago

I live in Utah, where most people own guns and a large group, myself included, have concealed carry permits. All interactions with strangers happen in that context, and we do ok. We've had some shootings. They're s seen as a reminder that individuals should carry more, not less.

emeraldd 14y ago
"An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life." -- Robert A. Heinlein http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertahe100989.html http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertahe100989.h...
- deltaepsilon 14y ago
  I've heard this quote a lot. Carrying a loaded weapon is a MASSIVE responsibility. It's really scary at first, but you can learn to do it effectively and safely with enough training. The training is critical.
  - spamizbad 14y ago
    A responsibility I'm not sure all (even law-abiding) adults are capable of handling. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pizza-shooter-claims-stand-ground-article-1.1225019 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/pizza-shooter-claim... Customer complains about Pizza taking too long. Gets in verbal altercation with armed gentleman. Result: shots fired. Thankfully no deaths.
    - sarvinc 14y ago
      Surely not all adults are capable of handling the responsibility of several things; debt, firearms, a vehicle, alcohol etc. I don't want to live in a place where this is a justification for anything.
- abolibibelot 14y ago
  Said the man who was a fierce proponent of the Vietnam war without setting foot there.
- dsr_ 14y ago
  An armed society is a scared society. If you think fear is better than freedom, I'm very sorry for you. Thought experiment: a customer comes to your office to talk about your product. He's wearing a gun on his belt, and no uniform. Are you more or less comfortable telling him that you won't implement the feature that he says he wants?
  - cema 14y ago
    Does not have to be about fear, can be about respect. Can also be about less fear (the gun being a great equalizer): for example, a frail person can be less afraid of punks. As far as your example, I am not quite sure what to make of it. Does not even sound like a good joke, sorry.

ISL 14y ago

When concealed-carry permit addresses were published by a journalist in our town in 2007, people who had fled abusive relationships were immediately forced to move. http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/108418 http://www.roanoke.com/news/roanoke/wb/108418 Transparent government is a net positive, but as with everything, we have to be careful with the consequences of our actions.

jrogers65 14y ago
Personally, I think that this has less to do with having a transparent than it does with personal privacy. I think that the latter trumps the former. Government is supposed to be open because everybody funds it through taxes. A private individual should have the freedom to remain private if they so choose.

freehunter 14y ago

I don't currently own any guns and have none registered to my name, but if gun owners were labelled similarly to sex offenders on a publicly searchable map like in the article, I would go out of my way to get put on that map. I don't shy from a gun; I hunt and target shoot using my family and friends' guns. I just don't own any due to not having a reasonable case for owning one in my current living situation (I have roommates). What purpose would that map serve? The only thing I can think of is your easily-offended neighbors would avoid you and your house. Good. If you're going to get up in arms (so to speak) about private and legal gun ownership and knowing that I own a gun is going to change your opinion of me for the worse, I'd like to know that before I invest significant time into building a relationship with you as my neighbor. If you're going to assume I'm a criminal just because I own a gun, I want nothing to do with you. Another benefit I could see from this type of map is a convenient listing of addresses that burglars may tend to shy away from. No one wants to rob a house and find a gun in their face if there is a house right next door without weaponry. Do I want this information presented in this way? Not particularly. There's not much benefit to the average person in knowing where legally registered guns are kept, and potentially negative consequences if the neighborhood kids now know that your house has guns they could get a hold of. I strongly disagree with the intentions of the journalists in this case, and applaud the lawyer for his response in a vigilante justice sort of way.

yozmsn 14y ago
Great point about wanting to be on that list, while it's unlikely that a criminal would use such a map to check your house before trying to rob, he now knows who DOESN'T own a gun (legally) and is a good candidate for robbery.
bayerian 14y ago
What purpose would that map serve? The only thing I can think of is your easily-offended neighbors would avoid you and your house. I can think of a few other potential side effects: 1) Problems for your kids. "No, you can't go and play at Timothy's house, his parents have a gun". 2) Making your house a target for people who want to steal your guns. 3) Potentially being discovered and held against you by employers.

rikacomet 14y ago

err... eye for an eye, leaves the whole world blind, Anyone remembers that? this exposes both groups to a lot of risk, really a bad call I would say. A criminal can use the info to take revenge on a media personnel, or rob/hurt/murder/rape someone without a gun.

jetti 14y ago
"err... eye for an eye, leaves the whole world blind, Anyone remembers that?" It seems people have taken on a more Parker Brothers attitude: "Sorry! You get me I get you back". "A criminal can use the info to take revenge on a media personnel, or rob/hurt/murder/rape someone without a gun." Just because somebody isn't on that map doesn't mean they don't have a gun. All it means is that they just don't legally own a gun.

afterburner 14y ago

Well, fear probably increases gun ownership, so not a bad move from the pro-gun side...

FourthProtocol 14y ago

If we're going to play like kids anyways, then I think more interesting would be a map showing journalists with gun permits.

amolsarva 14y ago

The main argument, and a silly one, summarizing the outrage about the map is "now criminals can find guns to steal". This is very silly -- there are plenty of maps to use to find banks, gun stores, gasoline, fertilizer...or rich people's homes.

bitcrusher 14y ago
The security at Banks and Gun Stores at least, is significantly higher than that of a personal residence, so, it's NOT that silly. The main argument is that "outing" people in a collective way, as though they are 'sex offenders'( per the text ) is absurd and offensive.
bonch 14y ago
The argument I've seen is that this is very the kind of politically-driven privacy invasion that gun owners have feared about gun registration laws.
delinka 14y ago
The inverse of the list is a collection of targets that are "safe" to invade. Edit: added quotes. Some criminal will certainly, without thinking, decide these are safe targets. And statistically speaking, they'd probably be right more often than not. At the least, it's a great list of targets to avoid if you're planning to loot a neighborhood.
- amolsarva 14y ago
  Not safe. They just don't have a registered gun. They have knives, security systems, gates, locks, police driving by. And the ones with guns may well be easy to invade. It happened to the mom of that killer last week. It's not a good argument but the gun fans do make it repeatedly.
- cheald 14y ago
  Registration is generally not required for a shotgun, which is what is commonly recommended for home invasion defense. While there is certainly going to be an overlap between owners of registered handguns and owners of unregistered shotguns, "house is not on the map, no guns to worry about in there" is a false assumption.

sethbannon 14y ago

The comments on the TC piece are quite disturbing, even by Internet comment standards.

jusben1369 14y ago
Seriously. What the heck happened to TC? It was never the high point of debate on the web but it's struggling to rank much above local trashy mag comments. And so much for the quality improvement we'd receive when people had to use their real identities. Is the problem AOL piping a lot of traffic into their stories?

andrewdubinsky 14y ago

Can I get added to the list of gun owners please? Make a note that I am an expert marksman and I shoot to kill. Also, please add that I don't own anything worth trading your life for.

jellicle 14y ago
Hi, internet tough guy!
- andrewdubinsky 14y ago
  I'm not a marksman, nor do I own a gun. Criminals should believe that I do so they will rob/rape/kill someone else instead of me.
chez17 14y ago
The fact that you get excited about killing another human shows you are not qualified to own a gun.
- cema 14y ago
  Actually, it does not.

pdx 14y ago

That some random individual with a blog can harvest the addresses of every single registered gun owner with a freedom of information request is thought provoking to me. In the past, I had vague fears about what such lists could be used for, but my fears were always aimed toward the group that held civil control. Now I am struck with how easy it is for the $FANATICAL_CAUSE down the street to obtain such a list. Such freedom of information is dangerous. This inability for a government to avoid releasing large databases full of dangerous information to random people is frightening. Is this the way the world is heading? If so, I have some business ideas I need to start working on. Let me use the freedom of information act to obtain the database that maps license plates to names and addresses. Next time you accidentally cut somebody off in traffic, expect him to be waiting at your house when you get home, after visiting my website. Maybe he's already had a little visit with your family while he was waiting. Let me use the the freedom of information act to obtain the tax returns of every person in an area. We'll publish how much you make, where you work, and the names and ages of your children, so anybody who might be interested in such things can visit my website to do searches. After all, information should be free, right? The only thing that scares me more than my government having complete and total knowledge of my life, is for it to be accessible by any lunatic with a computer. That was a worry I didn't even have when I woke up this morning.

cafard 14y ago
About 35 years ago, someone acquired a list of all persons with a concealed carry license in New York City, and published it in a newspaper or magazine. It created a nine-days wonder and as far as I know has been forgotten ever since.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
jlarocco 14y ago
IMO, there's not much difference between government employees and arbitrary members of the general public. It's a safe assumption that if the government is collecting personal information then random strangers will have access to it.

Torgo 14y ago

Stuff like this pretty much confirms the NRA's fears about gun registration. It didn't immediately result in gun confiscation or anything, but yeah--it's just used for registration today, but tomorrow it's used against you.

amolsarva 14y ago
The downside is you get embarrassed when someone makes a map. That's the NRA fear. (Edit: that's WHAT the NRA fear) Similar downside for...driver's licenses, passports, political contributions, subscriptions to magazines or any other database where it is useful to have records of who does what.
technoslut 14y ago
I don't like this but I don't understand how this deals with "NRA fear." Many NRA members are proud they have a gun. Like anyone else, they are eager to tell or show why like them.
- tedunangst 14y ago
  It's like the google real name debate in reverse. Some people are proud to identify with a group, so therefore we should out everybody, right?

JohnFromBuffalo 14y ago

I saw this coming from a mile away as soon as I saw the map go up yesterday. I think the real debate is mental health and deeper checks on those who are at higher risk of violence in the mental health community. The stigma also needs to be removed from our culture of such diseases so we as a culture can move beyond the gun debate and concentrate on those who lash out with violence. As a gun owner, I am both for stricter controls but its obvious that gun control only affects those who are legally looking to buy guns .. not the violent offenders in our culture.

crazygringo 14y ago

The thing that bothers me most is that people's addresses are a matter of public record, period. It's one thing to know someone has a gun license, or donated money to a political candidate, or owns a domain name. It's another thing to reveal where they live. Sometimes people move for a good reason, and don't want someone else to be able to find them. (Abuse cases, etc.) Other countries solve this by having ID numbers -- American SSN's are the closest. Those can be used in official documents, etc. Whereas in the US, domain names and other licenses are assigned to someone with a particular name, at a particular address, since SSN's aren't supposed to be used as general-purpose ID numbers, and what other option do you have?

norswap 14y ago

Live by the sword, die by the sword.