Say Anything Blog

What’st he worst that could happen?

Here’s the paper defending its decision:

The Tennessee Firearms Association and others have fanned the frenzy against our Web site posting of the permit-to-carry list. Pro-gun groups orchestrated a protest campaign that has spread nationwide. By late last week, Commercial Appeal executives were receiving as many as 600 e-mails a day, along with dozens of phone calls at home, at work and on their cell phones. Maps to their houses, with ominous warnings, had been posted online.

Our crime? Putting up a Web-only database that allows people to search by name or ZIP code for those who have a permit to carry a concealed weapon in Tennessee. The list came from the Tennessee Department of Safety and is available to anyone who wants it, simply by contacting the agency’s office. The state of Tennessee, to this point, has decided that the right to carry a concealed weapon comes with the responsibility of agreeing to have a public record of who is packing.

The newspaper did edit the state’s publicly available list. We removed street addresses and birth dates from the information to lessen any chance that somebody might use information on the list for identify theft. As a result, our posted list of permit holders for concealed weapons has less information about individuals than the phone book, your voter registration form or the credit card you use to buy dinner at a restaurant.

It’s hard to get too upset about this given that the information is, in fact, publicly available.  But I wonder what motivated the newspaper to do this?  In an age where print news is hemorrhaging money, what prompted them to expend precious resources on obtaining this data, editing it and publishing it on their website?  What informational need was served?

None that I can see, outside of provoking gun owners by giving them the same sort of treatment sex criminals get.  But it is publicly-available data, so there’s no legal problems here.  Yet it’s certainly valid to question the motivation here.

On a related note, if gun permit holders are publicly-available information, why isn’t there a database of people who receive welfare and other sorts of government assistance?  If gun owners are to be subjected to this sort of treatment merely for getting (what should be unnecessary) permission from the government to exercise their 2nd amendment rights, why can’t there be a database for people who are taking government handouts?  How about a big database of everyone on welfare and everyone taking special government-backed loans and all the businesses taking loads of government “economic development” money?

If you’re thinking those things would violate privacy, at least now you know how the gun owners feel.