I don't currently own any guns and have none registered to my name, but if gun owners were labelled similarly to sex offenders on a publicly searchable map like in the article, I would go out of my way to get put on that map. I don't shy from a gun; I hunt and target shoot using my family and friends' guns. I just don't own any due to not having a reasonable case for owning one in my current living situation (I have roommates).
What purpose would that map serve? The only thing I can think of is your easily-offended neighbors would avoid you and your house. Good. If you're going to get up in arms (so to speak) about private and legal gun ownership and knowing that I own a gun is going to change your opinion of me for the worse, I'd like to know that before I invest significant time into building a relationship with you as my neighbor. If you're going to assume I'm a criminal just because I own a gun, I want nothing to do with you. Another benefit I could see from this type of map is a convenient listing of addresses that burglars may tend to shy away from. No one wants to rob a house and find a gun in their face if there is a house right next door without weaponry.
Do I want this information presented in this way? Not particularly. There's not much benefit to the average person in knowing where legally registered guns are kept, and potentially negative consequences if the neighborhood kids now know that your house has guns they could get a hold of.
I strongly disagree with the intentions of the journalists in this case, and applaud the lawyer for his response in a vigilante justice sort of way.
The reasoning here is that a stolen-but-legally-obtained-and-registered-by-someone-else gun is worth an awful lot on the black market. It's effectively untraceable once it's stolen, meaning that crimes committed with it are much harder to pin on the perpetrator.
One could probably trivially combine the gun ownership data with publicly available property value data to pick targets for robbery.
You could further enhance it with proxies for use of security systems such as 911 calls (can one FOIA a list of all 911 calls?), but with the software industry as it is anyone going to all this trouble could probably make a better return by getting a job or just doing freelance dev work.
I thought that calls to 911 from security systems didn't happen directly. As I understand it, if a system is tripped, the security system's call center calls you, and in certain circumstances, would then call 911 on your behalf but not necessarily from your house.
Thats typically correct. My thought was that if you knew what numbers security monitoring companies would call from, you could filter out those calls, then extract the addresses they reported incidents at. Of course the monitoring company will filter out a lot of false alarms, so you'll get less data points to work from, so like I say... I'm not sure it would be worth it.
#2 isn't a likely example simply because life doesn't work out that way. The people who steal a gun is usually from someone they know.
#3 is possible but, with what has happened so far, conservative bosses have threatened to decline their workforce if Obama won the election. Nothing has been shown to the opposite.
The people who steal guns have never before had an easy menu from which to choose.
Many gun thefts are crimes of opportunity/passion like you say, but not all. Most violent offenders don't steal the guns they use to commit crimes they buy them from the black market. Promoting a black market opportunity is a very dumb policy.
An old (circa 1997) U.S. Department of Justice survey of prison inmates possessing a firearm during the offense that put them in jail showed that only 14% bought their gun from a retail store, pawn shop, flea market, or gun show. 40% acquired their firearms from family or friends. [0] The remainder were stolen or purchased on the black market. I can't say whether recent trends are any different, it's not my area of interest anymore.
The FBI compiles data on the theft of guns through the Stolen Gun File of the NCIC database [1]. I haven't had access in a long time but when I was doing research many years ago I found that between 1992 and 2002, around 1.7 million firearms were taken, representing a rate of 16.8 stolen firearms for every one thousand households. Of those stolen weapons, 687,857 were later recovered by authorities or by "guns for x" amnesty turn-in programs as of 2002. So that means more than one million of those stolen firearms were unaccounted for as of 2002.
[0]: Caroline Wolf Harlow, Firearm Use by Offenders, Bureau of Justice Statistics, November 2001 (sorry no link available that I know of)
What if the data in question regarding #3 was not a database of weapon permits but say a database of marijuana licenses or tax stamps which seems an almost inevitable conclusion of current political trends? Ok with your employer knowing about your legal possession and use of a now legal substance?
On the flip side as a startup founder making important key first hiring decisions would you want to know about a candidates legal drug use?
What about Scott Eckern, the Sacramento theatre director who made a donation in support of California's Proposition 8?
I'd be wary of suggesting people of only one political viewpoint behave badly, since we don't know what issue will be the lightning rod in the future. Recording and sharing less information protects all of us.
> 3) Potentially being discovered and held against you by employers.
Interesting, I just realized that political viewpoints is not necessarily a protected class [1]. Presumably owning a gun is sort of a political view. Can an employer technically discriminate against such people? It feels like a class action law suit waiting to happen so I am guessing there is a law out there that gets violated.
You can fire someone for owning a gun in most states. Gun owners aren't a protected class except for Missouri where a law was recently passed to make them one, despite no known cases of someone firing an employee for gun ownership. Interestingly, LGBT individuals aren't a protected class in Missouri, despite many cases of firing employees for being an LGBT individual.
The libertarian in me feels that gun ownership or the lack thereof shouldn't be any business of my employer. I am however more offended that what a person does in their bedroom is not protected by Federal Law.
I can imagine making political viewpoint a protected class could have immediate negative ramifications on politicians, making it unlikely that political viewpoint will ever become a protected class.
Unless maybe corporations set up to run campaigns could somehow be excluded from this perhaps?
The issue with posting the maps is that it can put people at risk.
If you're a bad guy, you can use this sort of information to find victims. Get a list of people with guns and cross-reference it with professions where the cash-based nature of the business makes it likely that folks have unreported money that can't be deposited in the bank. People who own laundries, tradesmen, jewelers, etc.
This sort of thing happened in my town in the 80's. Someone broke into a locksmith shop and took records of safe installations and re-keying. There were a number of subsequent burglaries of home safes owned by people with jewelry industry ties that went unreported until someone was assaulted when they interrupted a robbery.
This is especially an issue in a NYC or other places where handgun registration is a really onerous process. If you made a FOIL request and also asked for the type of handgun permit (target, carry, concealed carry, etc), it would be an even bigger personal safety risk.
I am not supporting the publishing of either set of information. So this is Devil's advocate a little. The only benefit I can see from publishing the original list would be that as a neighbor it might be nice to know if your neighbor's owned guns. Why? Well, if they also displayed disturbing behavior it might be good to have that as context. To dramatically simplify - perhaps it would be nice to have some additional context to put around the house down the street or across the way where there is ongoing issues of domestic violence/mental illness or disturbing behavior.
One of the most disappointing elements of Newton was that the family understood that their child had severe behavioural issues and also kept the means for massive destruction within the house. Perhaps a third party could have encouraged the removal or one or the other when witnessing the anti social behaviour.
Lastly, however flawed, the newspaper did present a logic of "common public good" while the response was purely vindicative/vengeance. It's worth noting.
But is this really a matter of something your neighbors need to know? Unless the person is acting irrationally, recklessly, or endangering others right in front of you, whether or not they have a gun is not more important than knowing if they have a lead pipe, a car, or a can of gas and a match. Whether or not someone has a gun in their house doesn't matter nearly as much as if they had one in their pocket.
Where it really comes through is that the police know. If the person is acting in a manner that makes you fear for you life enough to question if they own a gun, that's the point where you step out of their lives and let the police step in. I would rather not have my neighbors call the police saying "freehunter is acting odd and he has a gun!" unless I'm currently holding that gun in my hand.
Maybe instead of a map showing where gun owners live, we should have a map showing where mentally unstable people live. They're potentially dangerous with or without a firearm. A gun always needs someone to pull the trigger, a person doesn't need weapons to cause harm.
>it might be nice to know if your neighbor's owned guns
I'm sure it's nice to know for robbers as well if they knew you didn't have one. The info was always available but now the ones who don't make an honest living know this.
This "robber" argument is incredibly FUD'ish and worth thinking through further. When we talk about gun ownership, robbers and guns we're usually discussing the fear of getting shot by a burgular. Getting robbed sucks but most of us have insurance and all of us agree it pales in comparison to getting shot.
So let's think this through:
- If a robber is robbing my house, and is armed, and we accidentally confront each other, which is my preferred state of mind? Which outcome is most likely to result in me not being shot?
a) Robber believes me to not be carrying any gun per this map?
b) Robber believes me to be carrying a gun (per this map?)
c) Robber has no access to this information so has to assume there's a 50/50 chance I'm packing heat?
Therefore the greatest risk, if any really comes from this map, is probably the identified gun owner vs the identified non gun owner should the robber (incorrectly) conclude the gun owner is away and the non gun owner is home and needing to quickly steal electronics for instant cash to buy illegal drugs.
It is not FUD. If someone wants to steal a gun they now have a list of soft targets from which to choose.
It reminds me of the furor that erupted when someone used 4square and twitter APIs to create a map of homes for which the owner was traveling. Wasn't it calked rob me or something?
In that case API access was terminated because the use violated the terms of service. Creating a map to promote breakins isn't something twitter or 4square does. I can see researchers or auditors having a valid use case for obtaining a list of weapons permits but a journalist/activist who just wants to disrupt the peace? Pretty dumb decision by the local authority or more probably one motivated by the politics of some local bureaucrat wanting to "make a difference" and abusing their authority.
Yes and I'm old enough to remember when a small but vocal % of people refused to put out automated out of office email replies because who knew who would receive them (anyone who emailed you) and what they could do to you knowing that you were away. Seems funny now but people at the time were certain it was a ticket to be robbed or worse.
It was a perfect example of TMI on the internet, but the difference I think was that people intentionally posted this information, whereas everyone listed by the paper had no choice.
Many home burglaries involve drug addicts who need immediate access to cash. So for those they'll first look for the empty home and then back into what to expect should they meet someone from there.
It may be most who do it when the family is not home but not all. A story came to mind a couple of years ago where a family was murdered in Penn. during a robbery. Most families are always home in some form and some thieves have short patience when it comes to what they want. An intelligent thief would use this information like this to their advantage.
The most famous story is of the Clutter family written about by Truman Capote. I'm not sure if they had a gun but the family was home and were intended to be murdered at the time of the robbery.
> To dramatically simplify - perhaps it would be nice to have some additional context to put around the house down the street or across the way where there is ongoing issues of domestic violence/mental illness or disturbing behavior.
This map only has legal guns, so it could potentially provide a false sense of safety. Best to just assume and act as though they do have a gun.
I would hate to see a neighbor take a domestic violence situation less seriously because the internet says there isn't a gun involved.
Adam Lanza had zero history of violent behavior, and certainly didn't do anything like threaten to kill people with guns. There was no way to foresee that he was going to behave like this, which makes this even more tragic.
You may not be hired, promoted, graduated, permitted to enter, permitted to buy, etc., ... because you have a registered firearm. Consider what HMOs, insurance companies, organizations, and governments have to say about gun ownership and you'll find your answer there.
I may have worded it in a slightly confusing manner. What I meant there is "what good would come from this map? Your whiny neighbors leave you alone and burglars may avoid you" then I meant to spell out the more negative side effects of such a map.
What purpose would that map serve? The only thing I can think of is your easily-offended neighbors would avoid you and your house. Good. If you're going to get up in arms (so to speak) about private and legal gun ownership and knowing that I own a gun is going to change your opinion of me for the worse, I'd like to know that before I invest significant time into building a relationship with you as my neighbor. If you're going to assume I'm a criminal just because I own a gun, I want nothing to do with you. Another benefit I could see from this type of map is a convenient listing of addresses that burglars may tend to shy away from. No one wants to rob a house and find a gun in their face if there is a house right next door without weaponry.
Do I want this information presented in this way? Not particularly. There's not much benefit to the average person in knowing where legally registered guns are kept, and potentially negative consequences if the neighborhood kids now know that your house has guns they could get a hold of.
I strongly disagree with the intentions of the journalists in this case, and applaud the lawyer for his response in a vigilante justice sort of way.