Homeless in Arizona

In Arizona all the political parties which have ballot status, i.e. Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians and Greens can get a CD with a list of all the registered voters.

About 15 years ago, Ernie wanted to put the list of registered voters on the internet as one of his publicity stunts to prove government is bad.

As a result of Ernest's Hancock threat to do this publicity stunt the state of Arizona actually passed a law making the stunt illegal.

Of course that law was just as dumb as Ernie's publicity stunt.

Listing of New York Gun owners from the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y.

N.Y. news site stirs outrage after publishing gun owners' names

December 26, 2012, 3:51 p.m.

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.”

Al Tompkins, a faculty member at the nonprofit Poynter Institute for journalism, criticized the database, saying in an email published on Poynter.org: "Publishing gun owners’ names makes them targets for theft or public ridicule."

But that may not happen, according to a study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technologythat examined the aftermath of a similar gun-ownership data dump by a newspaper.

In 2008, the Commercial Appeal in Memphis published a searchable database of concealed-carry handgun permit owners in Tennessee that included names and ZIP codes of gun owners (but not addresses). A similar furor followed. "What they've done is give criminals a lighted pathway to [burglarize] the homes of gun owners," Chris Cox, now the top lobbyist for the National Rifle Assn., told the paper at the time.

But that concern turned out to be wrong, according to the 2010 study by Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon, and Catherine Tucker, a professor at MIT, titled "Guns, Privacy and Crime."

Using the information published by the Commercial Appeal, they found burglaries in 2009 declined 18% in the city's ZIP codes with the most concealed-carry permits and generally increased in ZIP codes with the fewest.

The researchers found no difference for violent crimes, such as assault, that often lack premeditation.

The study also suggested that, following publication of the Memphis database, burglary risk instead shifted to areas with fewer gun registrations. In fact, the study noted that the "results suggest that, despite activism on the part of gun owners against the publication of such databases, it may actually be gun permit holders who benefited" from publication.

In an email, Acquisti said that, to his knowledge, the study was the first to examine how publicizing the location of guns affected crime rates.

He called the issue “extremely complex” and cautioned about making generalizations from one study. Even though he didn’t find evidence that publishing gun owners’ general locations put owners in danger, he said a “lack of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Acquisti said it was an “open question” whether increasingly precise location data, like that published on the Journal News' website, would affect burglar behavior.

The findings don't clear up a different NRA talking point -- that as its top strategist Cox had put it, "The essence of right-to-carry is that in a world where wolves cannot distinguish between lions and lambs, the whole flock is safer." In other words, instead of claiming gun privacy as a means of protection for those who choose to carry, the lions-and-lambs argument holds that gun privacy protects the general public, including those who don't own a gun.

"Frequently, in this debate, personal privacy is contrasted to collective security," the study's authors wrote. "However, there are situations where the opposite may happen: criminals may use personal data to choose which potential victims to avoid. Our results bear witness to the nuances of this debate."

Source

Map of handgun owners published in New York newspaper

By Eileen AJ Connelly

Associated Press

Posted: 12/27/2012 08:08:07 AM PST

NEW YORK -- A newspaper's publication of the names and addresses of handgun permit holders in two New York counties has sparked online discussions -- and a healthy dose of outrage.

The Journal News, a Gannett Co. newspaper covering three counties in the Hudson Valley north of New York City and operating the website lohud.com, posted a story Sunday detailing a public-records request it filed to obtain the information.

The 1,800-word story headlined, "The gun owner next door: What you don't know about the weapons in your neighborhood," said the information was sought after the Dec. 14 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., about 50 miles northeast of the paper's headquarters in White Plains. A gunman killed his mother, drove to an elementary school and massacred 20 first-graders and six adults, then shot himself. All the weapons used were legally owned by his mother.

The Journal News story includes comments from both sides of the gun-rights debate and presents the data as answering concerns of those who would like to know whether there are guns in their neighborhood. It reports that about 44,000 people in Westchester, Putnam and Rockland counties are licensed to own a handgun and that rifles and shotguns can be purchased without a permit.

It was accompanied online by maps of the results for Westchester and Rockland counties; similar details had not yet been provided by Putnam County. A reader clicking on the maps can see the name and address of each pistol or revolver permit holder. Accompanying text states that inclusion does not necessarily mean that an individual owns a weapon, just who obtained a license.

By Wednesday afternoon, the maps had been shared about 30,000 times on Facebook and other social media.

Most online comments have criticized the publication of the data, and many suggest it puts the permit holders in danger because criminals have a guide to places they can steal guns. Others maintain it tells criminals who does not have a gun and may be easier to victimize, or where to find law enforcement figures against whom they might hold a grudge.

Some responded by publicizing the home addresses and phone numbers of the reporter who wrote the piece, along with other journalists at the paper and even senior executives of Gannett. Many echoed the idea that publicizing gun permit holders' names is tantamount to accusing them of doing something wrong, comparing the move to publishing lists of registered sex offenders.

The Journal News is standing behind the project. It said in the story that it published a similar list in 2006.

"Frequently, the work of journalists is not popular. One of our roles is to report publicly available information on timely issues, even when unpopular," Janet Hasson, president and publisher of The Journal News Media Group, said in an emailed statement. "We knew publication of the database (as well as the accompanying article providing context) would be controversial, but we felt sharing information about gun permits in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings."

Roy Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank, said publishing the data was "too indiscriminate."

He, too, compared the maps to similar efforts involving sex-offender registries or lists of those arrested for driving under the influence, noting that such a move is usually done to indicate a serious problem that requires a neighbor or parent to maintain vigilance.

"You get the connotation that somehow there's something essentially wrong with this behavior," he said of the gun permit database.

"My predisposition is to support the journalism," Clark said. "I want to be persuaded that this story or this practice has some higher social purpose, but I can't find it."

Also common among the comments on the lohud.com were suggestions about suing the paper for violating permit-holders' privacy rights. Such a move would likely be unsuccessful.

"The media has no liability for publishing public information," said Edward Rudofsky, a First Amendment attorney at Zane and Rudofsky in New York. The issue does present a clash between First and Second amendment rights, he said, but in general, the law protects publishing public information unless the intent was to harm someone.

Here is a link to the article with the map of gun owners in it:

Source

Here is a link to the article in the Journal News of White Plains, N.Y.