Thursday, December 27, 2012

Newspaper Prints Names Of Gun Owners, Outs Battered/Stalked Women

From the LA Times:
In the annals of the gun debate, both the act and the outrage that followed are familiar: On Saturday, the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y., published an interactive map showing the names and addresses of thousands of handgun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties.
Click on a dot and zoom in: You'll get a name and an address of everybody who owns a handgun permit, which the paper obtained through a public records request.
The story soon dominated the Internet. Through Wednesday, it was still drawing outrage from online commentators as well as from conservative political interests such as Breitbart.com, which saw a media outlet targeting law-abiding gun owners' privacy -- and safety -- after a polarizing tragedy in Newtown, Conn.
“I am outraged by this as you have put me, my family, friends and others at risk," wrote Keisha Sutton on the newspaper's Facebook page. "My family and friends consist of law enforcement officers and 'licensed' handgun owners.”
Others argued that publishing such personal information would drive gun owners to the black market.
CynDee Royle, the newspaper's editor and vice president/news, was not surprised at the reaction.
"We knew publication of the database would be controversial," she said, "but we felt sharing as much information as we could about gun ownership in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings.”  http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-newspaper-gun-owners-20121226,0,2883615.story
From Newsfeed: Understandably, gun owners and privacy-rights activists are rather upset. The article, posted Saturday, has since received nearly 2,000 comments, most of them criticizing the newspaper. “This is the type of thing you do for sex offenders, not law-abiding gun owners,” wrote commenter Curtis Maenza. Others pointed out that the map could in fact help promote additional crimes, by highlighting homes that do not have guns, providing “a list of homes to avoid, now knowing that the other homes in the neighborhood are not armed and thus easier to invade,” wrote commenter Joseph Conklin.
Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/26/outrage-after-new-york-paper-posts-map-of-gun-owners-names-and-addresses/#ixzz2GK4JUDIa
When this idiot "newspaper" printed the names of the people who had legally purchased and licensed a firearm, the newspaper outed women who had bought a firearm for protection from stalkers, pissed off boyfriends/husbands that beat them and also outed former police officers who now have to worry that criminals they put in jail will now come after them.
But a blogger decided that turnabout is fair play and outed the newspaper employees by printing and mapping their addresses:
The map indicates the addresses of all Journal News Employees in the New York Tri-State area. Each dot represents an individual Journal News employee -- a reporter, editor or staffer. The data does not include freelancers — reporters or photographers — which can be hired without being an employee. Being included in this map does not mean the individual at a specific location is a responsible reporter or editor, just that they are a reporter or editor.
Data for all categories is included, but certain information is not available on an individual basis. http://www.newrochelletalk.com/content/map-where-are-journal-news-employees-your-neighborhood
So, take a look at the map where the newspaper people and maybe send them a nice letter thanking them for outing battered and stalked women along with former cops who now have to think about the criminals who may be after them.

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