A newspaper's publication of the names and addresses of handgun permit holders in two New York counties has made quite a stir on the Internet, according to The Associated Press.
The Journal News, which covers three counties in the Hudson Valley, on Sunday published, "The gun owner next door: What you don't know about the weapons in your neighborhood."
The project, a result of the mass school shootings in Newtown, Conn., was accompanied online by maps that have the names and addresses of hundreds of handgun permit holders.
By Wednesday afternoon, the maps had shared about 30,000 times on Facebook and other social media. Many of the commenters expressed outrage.
Roy Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank, said publishing the data was "too indiscriminate."
"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. I want to be persuaded that this story or this practice has some higher social purpose, but I can't find it."
Read more in this report from the AP.
Would this constitute helping thieves to acquire illegal guns (before the fact)? And would the paper technically be involved in whatever crimes were committed with guns stolen through the information provided by these journalists?
Sometimes people just don't think when they have personal agendas.
Posted by: F D Qualls | December 27, 2012 at 11:48 AM