And normally, I don't have a problem with registration, but the only way I could support it at the Federal level is if a law is passed that the personal information of registered firearm owners is to remain confidential to prevent abuses of that info like this one.
If we can resolve those issues, I'd have no real problems with it.
Here's my thing, why shouldn't it be public information that someone has a weapons permit? I see claims of omg someone's gonna steal my guns or such, I might even lean toward it being a privacy issue, if it didn't involve something you could kill your neighbor with from your living never leaving the living room to do it.
I'm reasonably sure the information is public in NY and this is just someone making a map out of it. Which does a lovely job of pointing out just how damn many guns there are out there, even in NY which is a pretty restrictive state on ownership. Without even going into Westchester county itself.
As it stands getting that information requires a FOIA request, so while it is technically publicly available, it isn't readily available...until now.
And as for why it shouldn't be public knowledge?
- This is a list of law-abiding citizens, not criminals.
- Criminals now have a map of which houses are armed and which aren't.
- Yes, the fear of a stolen firearms is a perfectly valid one, considering they are some of the most nabbed items.
- This map does nothing to locate illicit firearms.
- This map does not show us which criminals have firearms.
- This map only serves to stigmatize lawful firearm owners when the only other group of people we do that to are registered sex offenders.
- A number of the people on this map are police officers and people under protective orders who are now worried that their abusers and criminals with a grudge will now have an easy way to track them down.
- When both the NRA and the Brady Campaign say it's a bad idea, then you can be pretty sure it's a bad fucking idea.
If they wanted to say how many permits are in any given county, or how many of whatever type of firearm are in a county, I'd have no problems with that. But a map with names and addresses of lawful firearm owners? No, that's going way too far, plain and simple.
I compare it to publishing a map of people who use marijuana. While there are some people who use marijuana irresponsibly, the vast majority of marijuana users and growers are doing what they do for benign, beneficial, or even necessary reasons. In the same way, while there are some irresponsible gun owners, the vast majority of them practice gun safety. They have not committed any crime. However, it is a
huge security risk for marijuana users and growers to have their information posted on the internet. While legal under my state's law, people who have a lot of marijuana are already prone to break-ins and robberies if news of their stash gets around. Marijuana plants are worth a
lot on the black market and people are willing to break in and steal them instead of acquire them legally. In the same way, publishing where the legal guns are on the internet is just going to give criminals a way to easily find target homes to break in to.
I know there's a bunch of hysterical parents defending this invasion of privacy, saying "I HAZ THE RITE TO KNO IF THERES A GUN IN THE HOUSE." No, you don't. Owning a legal gun, like taking legal marijuana, is a private choice that people make in their private lives. You don't get to expose people's private lives to the entire fucking world just because you're terrified that gun owners will eat Dorothy and her little dog too.
Just because information is public does not make it newsworthy. People own guns for a wide range of law-abiding reasons. If you are not breaking the law, there is no compelling reason to publish the data.
Publishing gun owners’ names makes them targets for theft or public ridicule. It is journalistic arrogance to abuse public record privilege, just as it is to air 911 calls for no reason or to publish the home addresses of police or judges without cause.
Unwarranted publishing of the names of permitted owners just encourages gun owners to skip the permitting.
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/199148/newspaper-publishes-names-addresses-of-gun-owners/Doxxing should be reserved for the kind of people who abuse cats and post footage of it on the internet.
