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New York Pistol Permit Owner List Leaked
An anonymous reader writes "On Friday, The Journal News caved under pressure of gun advocates and shut down the interactive maps which contained the names and addresses of licensed gun owners in upstate New York. The maps are still visible on the site, however they are simply static images. The Journal News published the interactive maps on December 23 which caused significant backlash. In a similar move, Gawker published the names of licensed gun owners in New York City without addresses. New York state Senator Greg Ball (Republican) called the removal of the data a 'huge win.' On Saturday, an anonymous user leaked the raw data used to build The Journal News maps."
i have to say i agree
all a criminal would have to do is sit there wait till you leave and go get a few
how can one leak data which has been made available through a FOIA request?
Either way, it's really not anyone's business. Should we also be putting people's personal information online for current driver's license holders?
What if one of those women holding a CHL did so owing to death threats from a jealous ex? They just put her life in danger.
Or, if you want to up the "obnoxious" factor, what if they published the names and addresses of women who have had abortions?
"Outing" people is a really low political tactic and needs to be illegal.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
In a similar move, Gawker published the names of licensed gun owners in New York City without addresses
The only reason John Cook didn't publish them is because the NYPD didn't give them to him.. John Cook made it pretty clear that he would have published the addresses if he had them.
Because the NYPD is more interested in raping and/or eating ladies and spying on Muslims than it is in honoring public records law, the list contains only the names, and not the addresses, of the licensees.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Seriously. I'm in Canada and own no guns. You're doing it wrong.
All you idiots are doing is invading peoples' privacy, advocating vigilante justice against people who have broken no laws, and providing a database of places that criminals can go steal guns that won't be traced to them.
Proper education and required licensing country-wide is the direction you should be going in. And that involves posting your Congressmens' e-mail addresses and phone numbers. Not the constituents.
Yes. About 2/3 of those uses are suicides, and the rest are almost all homicides with illegal guns. Gun control has no significant effect reducing either of these numbers. There is a small remainder of homicides committed with legally owned guns and accidents, but many legal products are far more dangerous. Furthermore, there is no justification for creating intrusive government regulation that prevents me from committing suicide with a gun.
Because they make any real, useful, gun control much less likely to happen. Their grandstanding is counter productive.
For example you try and say "Hey, we really should register firearms. After all you register your car, why not guns too? It would allow for some tracking and accountability, and in the event someone becomes a prohibited person easier allow courts to determine if they have any guns that need to be surrendered." Well the gun lobby shoots back with "No, unacceptable, if you have a registry it can be used to target gun owners." You respond "That's silly, it would be used only for lawful purposes by the proper authorities."
Then, this happens, in a place that has a gun registry. Now the gun lobby doesn't have to talk in hypotheticals, or other nations, they can point to something that happened right in America that is precisely the kind of shit they are talking about. Now more moderate gun owners, who might have been amenable, or at least accepting, of the idea hate it because they believe what the gun lobby is saying.
Gun haters have to accept and get over the fact that guns are NOT going to be banned, period, end of story, unless the second amendment is repealed. All kinds of arguments have been tried and all have failed, the supreme court has ruled that the 2nd does in fact mean that gun ownership is a protected, individual, right.
As such trying stupid shit to do things that are bans but not in name, or to harass or make things difficult for gun owners are counter productive. All they do is polarize things, convince gun owners that any and all controls are bad because they'll be abused.
Stunts like this are nothing but harmful.
There is no public interest knowing if a woman has had an abortion.
Unfortunately, there are many people who disagree with you on this.
And what would knowing do for you? Your neighbor, instead of hiding the fact that he has weapons like criminals do, follows the law and registers his legally obtained weapons. This information is already available to see. What people are mad about is when some asshat decides to conveniently collect all of this information so that only criminals have a use for it. Oh, criminals and idiots who think law-abiding citizens should be ostracized or treated differently because they are exercising their rights and acting in a responsible manner.
If my neighbor carries loaded guns around I want to know about it.
And I want a pony. The issue is if you have the right to know. He has the constitutional right to those weapons. We may not (yet) have constitutional rights to privacy, but your wanting to know doesn't mean you have to know. Besides, if he has a concealed carry permit, the whole point is that you don't know.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Thus speaks someone who thinks with his guts and not his brain.
When did all sex offenders become pedophiles? Most of them are not.
When did all pedophiles become criminals? Most of them never commit any crimes. You don't commit rapes because you are sexually attracted to women (or men), do you?
Do you know the recidivism rate for child molestation compared to other crimes? Like, for instance, gun crime?
Did you know that when you are willing to deny some people their rights, you also say that it's okay to deny you your rights when you disgust enough people?
All violent/abusive crimes are bad, whether they're sexual or not. But people are capable of changing for the better, which is why we do not give them life in prison, and consider their debt to society paid when they have served their sentence. In civilized societies, at least.
It's true! <These> kill more children each year than pedophiles, so let's ban those!
To be fair, I don't think foot fetishists kill many children at all. It's kind of not their thing.
Can start with alcohol, if you like....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_driving_in_the_United_States#Statistics
Hell, why not publish data on who has large coin collections at home while we're at it. This is yet another example why people shouldn't register their weapons with the government.
You can only have pacifism, because someone else has a gun. That gun is not necessarily the shotgun I use for squirrel hunting on Saturdays. It is the gun that the Marine carries every day in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Germany, or the Azores, or anywhere else our troops have gone, and died to. Peace is a great thing to wish for, but someone else has to be put in harm's way for you to acheive it. Had it not been for guns, the world would be a much different place right now. We would still be honoring Queen Elizabeth as our monarch. It's even possible that some of us would still be the property of the rich people.
You may not like guns, and that's fine. But don't forget all the good that people wielding guns have done in the world. And don't forget all the evil that men wielding guns have done in this world either.
21st Century Renaissance Man
Right back at ya! Knowing who has had an abortion would enable me to know who not to trade with, who not to vote for, and where not to live.
I can vote with my feet and with my wallet, and my votes go for life.
We are not denying them their rights, when they commit a crime and break the law, they are voluntarily giving up their rights.
What rights, and for how long? There's a prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment in the Bill of Rights for a reason; the punishment must fit the crime. In the case of sex crimes, the lifelong punishment that comes after all jail time has been served, fines paid, etc. is almost always excessive.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Agreed, I live in the area, and i know the 2 homeowners who have been broken into since this has happened. Nothing but the gun safes were touched, coincidence? I think not
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
If you need the paper to tell on your neighbors, well I dont think you know how to be a neighbor. In what world does one NEED to know that his neighbor has a gun? And on the same note, if you really NEEDED to know this, why wouldnt you simply ask your neighbor??
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
By Taylor Berman:
On Friday, The Journal News took down its controversial, interactive online map of licensed gun owners in Westchester and Rockland counties in New York. According to Journal News publisher Janet Hasson, the move was in response to recently passed gun legislation in New York, which includes a provision prohibiting the release of information about gun owners, and not because of the firestorm of criticism the paper's received since publishing the list four weeks ago. From publisher Janet Hasson's statement on the Journal News' website:
"Today The Journal News has removed the permit data from lohud.com. Our decision to do so is not a concession to critics that no value was served by the posting of the map in the first place. On the contrary, we've heard from too many grateful community members to consider our decision to post information contained in the public record to have been a mistake. Nor is our decision made because we were intimidated by those who threatened the safety of our staffers. We know our business is a controversial one, and we do not cower."
http://gawker.com/5977304/the-journal-news-took-down-its-controversial-map-of-gun-owners
If my neighbor carries loaded guns around I want to know about it.
And I want a pony. The issue is if you have the right to know. He has the constitutional right to those weapons. We may not (yet) have constitutional rights to privacy, but your wanting to know doesn't mean you have to know. Besides, if he has a concealed carry permit, the whole point is that you don't know.
Apparently not. They're from publicly available records. If it's in the public interest to keep those records private, they're going to have to change the law to make it so.
Why the hell is it any of your business what your neighbor does at all as long as he's not hurting anyone? Let him carry all the guns he wants to, I say. Decide to murder someone? Let em rot in jail. Look at it this way - it's not that crack should be illegal, robbing folks should be. You wanna be a crackhead, that's fine. Want to be a crack head that robs people for crack money? Then off to jail with you. We need to stop blaming actions on inanimate objects and demand that people accept personal responsibility for their actions.
It already happened. And they decided to hire guards who have guns to protect them. and yet they still do not believe they did anything wrong.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
People who commit a crime think they'll get away with it. They aren't agreeing to get caught, much less give up their rights.
If you can't hold it and step behind some bushes to pee and get spotted by a ten year old kid, you can be convicted of indecent exposure in most states. That can get you placed on a sex offender list for life in many states (some, like Colorado, came to their senses and created a second crime for non-sexual exposure which is neither a sex crime nor a felony). Once you're on the sex offender list, your name, address and photo would be made available to anyone who cares to look for registered sex offenders in the area you live in. In some places, you'd no longer be able to live within 1000 feet of a school or day care center. You'd have to tell anyone you were trying to rent from that you were a convicted sex offender, too, so most places wouldn't take you as a tenant. It's also a felony, so you'd no longer be able to own a gun or vote. You'd be required to admit that you were convicted sex offender on job applications, which would severely limit your employment opportunities. The list of long-term affects on your life goes on and on, but basically you're screwed for life.
Cruel and unusual is a fitting description.
Do you really think that you would have been agreeing to all that when you decided to step behind a bush and take a leak? Of course not. You'd have thought you wouldn't be seen and it would be okay.
When someone commits a crime, that means they break law(s) set by society. Civilized Western countries (in this case, as with most cases related to criminal law being even remotely reasonable, US is not on the list) tend to have a legal process which causes loss of ability to inflict any more crimes of this nature for a period during which they try to rehabilitate that citizen so he will not commit those crimes when his freedom to act is restored.
This should not cause loss of any rights not directly related to the said crime. They are still humans, and still citizens of the country with all the legal protection granted to all other citizens.
US has a strong history of frontier justice due to its very recent colonial past, which causes it to have a very skewed "punish for vengeance, not prevention and rehabilitation" culture largely absent in most of the world. Restriction of rights not related to crime is VENGEANCE, not REHABILITATION. In vast majority of the Western world, avenging crimes by society is viewed as uncivilized brutality. A great example of this is Norway and its handling of Breivik.
It's one of the major cultural clashes that US tends to have with other countries, and one of the main reasons why prison populations in US are completely different from those in rest of Western world.
Here is a citation for you: the recent CDC report that the media has been trying to sweep under the rug. It states that binge drinking and overdrinking, among just women and girls, contributes to the deaths of 23,000 in a year. But you know, guns are super evil. Or howabout this from the CDC site: There are approximately 80,000 deaths attributable to excessive alcohol use each year in the United States. You citation needed types piss me off. Stop being so fucking lazy.
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
And what would knowing do for you? Your neighbor, instead of hiding the fact that he has weapons like criminals do, follows the law and registers his legally obtained weapons. This information is already available to see. What people are mad about is when some asshat decides to conveniently collect all of this information so that only criminals have a use for it. Oh, criminals and idiots who think law-abiding citizens should be ostracized or treated differently because they are exercising their rights and acting in a responsible manner.
Exactly!
The claim and exercise of a Constitutional Right cannot converted into a crime" Miller v. U.S. 230 F.2d 486 (1956). But in New York, for example, they have done just that. If I were a gun owner in New York, I'd refuse to comply, based on the Supremacy of the 2nd Amendment. New York's law is clearly unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution.
BTW, Certain members of Slashdot that want to get rid of all guns not owned by the government would do well to read this page; but they won't...
Yes. About 2/3 of those uses are suicides, and the rest are almost all homicides with illegal guns. Gun control has no significant effect reducing either of these numbers. There is a small remainder of homicides committed with legally owned guns and accidents, but many legal products are far more dangerous. Furthermore, there is no justification for creating intrusive government regulation that prevents me from committing suicide with a gun.
Actually...
In the US, we have no real numbers on gun control and suicide rates, homicide rates, or pretty much anything else because the gun lobby has worked to destroy any public funding for such research, and to end careers of anyone who tries to independently study them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26guns.html?pagewanted=all
In Australia, they had real, significant reductions in suicides when they implemented their gun controls. Also, they had previously had a number of mass shootings, and have had 0 since.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/17/opinion/australia-banned-assault-weapons-america-can-too.html
"The Australian Institute of Criminology found that gun-related murders and suicides fell sharply after 1996. The American Law and Economics Review found that our gun buyback scheme cut firearm suicides by 74 percent. In the 18 years before the 1996 reforms, Australia suffered 13 gun massacres — each with more than four victims — causing a total of 102 deaths. There has not been a single massacre in that category since 1996."
AU suicide stats: http://www.mindframe-media.info/for-media/reporting-suicide/facts-and-stats
Any category of outing where the information is only available because of the nanny state in the first place.
There isn't a database of permit holders because some marketing person decided to figure out who they can best sell gun range memberships to. There's a database because the government--you know, the same nanny state you're talking about--forcibly collected the information in the first place under threat of jail. If the government collects the information against people's will, it's not "nanny state" to prevent them from doing even more harm by releasing it. Anyone who really objects to a nanny state wouldn't want the government collecting the information to begin with, and if they didn't collect the information, nobody would be able to out anyone using it.
If you're going to tell the story, tell the WHOLE story. ... ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of God, awaiting the day that God gives him the nod to come BACK to earth as the Avenger.
The Christ you speak of is not a pacifist, per se. He paid the price to win his Father's approval, and to satisfy the Law.
Believe the story or not, believe in God or not, that's your choice, but if you're going to tell the story, tell the entire story. This is the problem with so many "Christian" cults - they cut and paste parts of the story, to suit their own purposes.
If Christ really does descend from Heaven again, that fruitcake Muhammed is going to look like a candy ass child, in comparison with what the Christ does.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Anarchist gun nut? I don't get it. Oh - you're just name calling, because you don't have an argument of any type to offer. I get it now. Cool, I guess, 'cause it means I win.
Let's analyze that name though. Anarchist? Hardly. I'm more of an authoritarian, than I am an anarchist. I'm more of a socialist than an anarchist too, as far as that goes. I LIKE the idea of government. I like the idea of government controlling nutcases, criminals, illegal aliens, and more. What I DO NOT LIKE, is the government infringing on the lives of law abiding citizens.
Gun nut? Maybe we need to define "gun nut". To me, a gun is a tool. Like any other tool, it has limited uses. You don't use a hammer to clean windows, you don't use a gun to clean windows, you don't use a screwdriver to clean windows - all of these tools would cause more destruction than a window cleaner can tolerate. I'm not a gun nut, or a hammer nut, or a screwdriver nut. I use each tool for it's intended purpose.
I guess I could return the favor, and call you an anti-gun-nut. I'll refrain though, and just point out that you are naive and uninformed.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I'm a pacifist too, but I have no beef with private ownership of firearms. Do you believe in arming the police? Is that anti-pacifistic? It seems like police carrying guns to protect society from violent people is no different than society itself carrying guns to protect themselves from aggression.
Pacifism doesn't mean not being armed; it means not being aggressive.
We're not talking about the broader scale of one nation attacking another nation here. We're talking about neighborhoods. At the neighborhood level, safe communities very rarely meet aggressive, violent people. Therefore, people living in safe communities rarely feel the need to own firearms for personal protection.
If I were buying a house, I would see high gun ownership in a neighborhood as a very bad sign, because it means that a large percentage of the people live in constant fear for their lives. It is an indicator of insufficient police protection, gang activity, drug activity, or other serious problems. It is not the only indicator (bars on windows are another good one), but it is a good indicator.
But even if that correlation did not exist, a high number of gun owners would still be a red flag. There's a reason we create police forces and military forces. They represent an elite group of people with the proper training and psychological stability to use firearms for the public good. They are actively monitored for psychological problems, they are trained to distinguish friend from foe, and they are trained to store their service weapons properly.
By contrast, out of those registered gun owners, assuming they represent a random sampling of the population, 26.2% will "suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in any given year." (Source: NIH) Most of them lack any formal training. And their weapons are probably stored in their bedside tables, fully loaded, just waiting to be stolen and used by someone who didn't pass a background check.
So yeah, there's a very real public interest to having that information. That said, I don't agree with the GP that it should be used when deciding who to buy from or other such nonsense. The individual data points are uninteresting (except when you meet someone, conclude that he or she is nuts, and then find out that he or she owns a firearm). It is mostly in aggregate that the information is relevant.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This is one thing I really cannot stand for people to say. We are not a democracy. Democracies are horrible things that allow the trampling of minorities. We should never just got with what the vast majority of people think simply because that is the majority for a couple of reasons. First off, this is the path that leads to tyranny. It is easy to see how a majority could impose their beliefs on the rest of the population: for example look at how much control the Christian fundamentalists have over America due to the majority of Christians. The other problem with democracy is that quite a large number of people are, quite simply put, stupid, evil, and easily manipulated. Are these the people you want deciding what is best for everyone? I don't.
Pretty much this. Most people watch far too many hollywood movies. Burglar's goal is stealing your stuff with as little risk as possible.
That means that #1 rule of any decent burglar is to enter when there's no one at home. That's why they employ countless techniques, such as calling, ringing the bell and so on before trying to enter.
Real methods of fighting burglars usually involve either convincing them you're home when you're not, or getting security setup that makes them think they have a high chance of getting detected during the crime.
A dog is way more effective than a gun for keeping the home secure.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.