Over the weekend, the Journal News published interactive maps that identify all pistol permit holders in New York’s Westchester and Rockland counties.
Gun owners are furious, as are people who don’t particularly care for guns but who love privacy.
And so we’re dragged into a debate about gun ownership, privacy, and press freedom.
Can the Journal News staff do what they did? Certainly. All of the information is public, as they repeatedly point out. Should they have done it? Almost certainly not.
People are arguing that criminals will make use of this information, choosing to burglarize houses that aren’t on the list and are thus undefended or choosing to burglarize houses that are on the list during the day in order to steal the guns while their owners are at work. Other people are arguing that it’s a vindictive and reactionary violation of people’s privacy, as no one is publishing interactive guides about any other personal property ownership and that gun ownership shouldn’t be stigmatized.
The Journal News staff argues that it’s providing a public service to its readers, that there’s a value in knowing which of your neighbors have a pistol permit. This is pretty much the only argument that makes sense for them, as there’s really no other reason to do what they did beyond simply drawing attention to their newspaper’s website.
Sadly, they’re wrong in their claim.
There’s no public service here because what they’ve highlighted doesn’t matter. This is true for two reasons:
1. Their information is radically incomplete, as the Journal News points out. The maps only include people who have pistol permits, but this could also include a bunch of people who don’t actually own guns. It could also leave out some people who don’t have permits. Having a permit is a requirement if you want to legally own a pistol … but not everyone who lives in these counties legally own pistols and not everyone who got the permit went on to buy the gun. And the maps don’t include rifles or shotguns. These can be purchased without a permit.
2. Knowing whether or not my neighbors have pistols doesn’t make a whole lot of difference to me. It doesn’t make me safer and it shouldn’t necessarily make me warier of the neighborhood in which I live or specifically of kindly old Mr. Johnson next door who has a permit. That is, unless someone wants to argue that there is no legitimate reason for someone to own a pistol. The Journal News staff doesn’t want to make that argument; in fact, the only argument they make appears under someone else’s name and it’s nothing but an anecdote about one person’s personal belief that all guns are always unsafe:
“I would love to know if someone next to me had guns. It makes me safer to know so I can deal with that,” said [John] Thompson, whose group counsels youths against gun violence. “I might not choose to live there.”
Knowing that someone next door has a gun doesn’t actually make Thompson safer; it might make him feel that he is safer for knowing it, but that’s a different story. This is just the opposite argument of the one that Wayne LaPierre floated on “Meet the Press”, that gun owners say they are safer because they have firearms in the house. LaPierre is wrong and so is Thompson; one’s personal feelings about safety don’t amount to facts about safety.
It’s no secret that I don’t like guns. But neither am I someone who thinks gun owners are all wingnuts who are stockpiling guns to protect themselves against the government (which is why I frequently lampoon those who are doing this) or to murder their neighbors. If you want to think seriously about ways to put a brake on gun deaths in our country — apart from arming everyone, which is the NRA position — simply publishing a list of (some) (potential) gun owners isn’t going to help.
HT: Anonymous Question Asker.
![Leaders of the National Rifle Association said Sunday that they would fight any new gun restrictions introduced in Congress, and they made clear that they were not interested in working with President Obama to help develop a broad response to the Connecticut school massacre.
During an appearance on the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” Wayne LaPierre, the vice president of the powerful gun lobby, was openly dismissive of a task force established by Mr. Obama and led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. that is examining ways to reduce gun violence.
One reason that LaPierre is so dismissive of the task force is likely that its stated goal is to reduce gun violence, while his entire career is built on expanding gun violence [Yeah, yeah, go ahead and write nasty messages to me about this]. Of course, that’s not what he’ll say; instead, he casts the task force as an assault on the 2nd Amendment:
“If it’s a panel that’s just going to be made up of a bunch of people that, for the last 20 years, have been trying to destroy the Second Amendment, I’m not interested in sitting on that panel,” Mr. LaPierre said, adding that the “N.R.A. is not going to let people lose the Second Amendment in this country, which is supported by the overwhelming majority of the American people.”
But, as for me, I don’t have any problem with people owning guns or with the 2nd Amendment. In fact, I’d like to see the 2nd Amendment taken far more seriously than LaPierre does. All he cares about is that people go out and buy lots of guns; he doesn’t care one iota about the 2nd Amendment beyond his perception that it keeps him in a job. Personally I think it’s well past time that we worked on regulating the militia demanded by the 2nd Amendment: If you want to own a gun, then you also need to be a member of a well regulated militia. You need to be out there on the weekends, drilling with your compatriots. Every weekend. For hours and hours. Not the occasional trip to the gun club for fun. Not taking apart and cleaning your rifle when you feel like it. All the time. With someone watching over you and giving you directions. And it all needs to be regulated. Not just a little either. Well regulated.
That’s the only way to secure a free state, after all.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/1a0a14069c3ada13c60f1b2c121fbce1/tumblr_mfi2w5koPL1qzy2emo1_500.jpg)
![ThinkProgress compiled the ten most unbelievable quotes from Wayne LaPierre’s astonishing NRA press conference, which was the first official word from the gun-loving lobby since last Friday’s mass shooting in a Connecticut elementary school:
1) Gun-free schools zones “tell every insane killer in America that schools are their safest place to inflict maximum mayhem with minimum risk.”
2) “There exists in this country a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.
3) “[V]iolent crime is increasing again for the first time in 19 years! Add another hurricane, terrorist attack or some other natural or man-made disaster, and you’ve got a recipe for a national nightmare of violence and victimization.”
4) “We need to have every single school in America immediately deploy a protection program proven to work —and by that I mean armed security.”
5) “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. Would you rather have your 911 call bring a good guy with a gun from a mile away … or a minute away?”
6) “And throughout it all, too many in our national media … their corporate owners … and their stockholders … act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators.”
7) “Then there’s the blood-soaked slasher films like ‘American Psycho’ and ‘Natural Born Killers’ that are aired like propaganda loops on Splatterdays and every day, and a thousand music videos that portray life as a joke and murder as a way of life.”
8) “In a race to the bottom, media conglomerates compete with one another to shock, violate and offend every standard of civilized society by bringing an ever-more-toxic mix of reckless behavior and criminal cruelty into our homes — every minute of every day of every month of every year.”
9) “Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse. And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?”
10) “Isn’t fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?”
My personal favorite — which is flying around the internet this morning — is, “This is the beginning of a serious conversation. We won’t be taking any questions.”
David Frum’s recent tweet captures my feelings on America’s love affair with guns nicely:](http://24.media.tumblr.com/c79053bc11c8459d95648a5e34565d3e/tumblr_mfe6doQ6NV1qzy2emo1_400.png)
