calling in backup

I suppose I should be thankful, in some manner, that the most-recent article from the Commercial Appeal concerning their privacy-invading database of handgun carry permit holders is an actual news story, rather than just another editorial. Granted, it was penned by Thomas Hargrove, a Scripps News Service staff journalist, but it just so happens that the same company that owns the Commercial Appeal also owns the Scrips News Service. What inbreeding?
Moving on to the article in question…

Lawmakers in Tennessee and six other states are pushing to give confidentiality to people who have obtained permits to carry concealed handguns in a dispute that pits gun-rights advocates against several newspapers and open-government groups.

I have to admit, this is not too bad of a lede… except for the errors, omissions, and potentially intentional misphrasings included in it. First up, my Tennessee Handgun Carry Permit gives me the ability to lawfully carry a handgun both concealed and openly. I cannot speak as to the laws in the other six states, but it would be nice if people paid attention to the market to which they were writing. Second, “gun-rights advocates” is a misleading, semantically null phrase – since when did inanimate objects have rights for which anyone could be an advocate? Finally, the game is not limited to just those individuals who are interested in preserving and exercising their Second-Amendment-protected rights… indeed, privacy advocates, victim advocates, and other similar organizations and individuals are weighing in on this situation.

The drive to make gun-permit records confidential resulted from emotional, often angry objections after newspapers, including The Commercial Appeal, posted government records on the Internet that showed who had gun permits.

Funny how the author tries to categorize all of the objections under the heading of “emotional”, with the majority of those further filed under the subheading of “angry”. I suppose that journalists have been so far removed from logic or rational thought for so long, that they cannot even identify it when it reaches up and smacks them upside the back of their collective heads.
There is nothing “emotional” about pointing out how a criminal could use this privacy-invading database to find out which homes probably do have firearms inside them, and then altering his behavior or plans based on that data. There is nothing “emotional” about showing how a stalker/abusive ex/victimizer could use this database to track down the victim that escaped him so long ago and now has a handgun carry permit in order to defend him/herself (especially when there are examples of just that). There is nothing “emotional” about indicating how you would prefer that your personal information (especially such important things as full names, dates of birth, and other personally-identifiable information) were kept private, given the very real threats of identity theft these days.
And there is absolutely nothing angry about any of that, either.
Now, I could get emotional, and I definitely could get angry, but, as the saying goes, “he who loses his temper first, loses.” Given how many editorials and articles the Commercial Appeal has put up concerning this database of theirs, I think it is safe to say they have lost their temper, but are diving head-first into defensive desperation.

“The press wants to put a scarlet letter on these people,” said Chris W. Cox, chief lobbyist for the National Rifle Association. “This serves no public good. It’s potentially dangerous to post these lists.”

Bah. Wish I had thought of that analogy first. Of course, I am not entirely sure I like being compared to an adulterer, but I guess the same concept applies in either case.
What the Commercial Appeal has done with their privacy-invading database is pure, unadulterated bigotry, and only serves to feed the fears of those who are already afraid of firearms and those who use them. How is that a good thing?

On the other side are newspapers like the St. Petersburg Times, which recently urged the Florida Legislature to roll back the 2006 ban on public scrutiny of handgun permits under the headline “Guess which ones carry guns.”

Like I said… “feed the fears”…

“The right to carry a concealed weapon should not trample the right to know who has a permit to carry one,” the newspaper said. “Those carrying guns might feel safer, but what about everyone else who cannot know if their neighbor or co-worker is carrying one?”

Let me make this very clear, and very simple for you: the public does not have a right to know. Period. End of story. Full stop. Furthermore, the public does not have a right to know my personal information, unless I choose to disclose that information of my own free will.
This is not about my right to carry a firearm (which, by the way, is backed up by this funny thing called an “Amendment”… what about the public’s non-existent “right to know”?), but rather my right to privacy, my right to keep my personal information personal, and my right not to be endangered by a stupid newspaper only looking to stir up a publicity pot and generate hits for their website.
Furthermore, those neighbors and co-workers already do not know if someone is carrying a gun, because there are these people called “criminals” who carry firearms whether they have permits or not (more than likely “not”). Empty argument, that.

Currently, 28 states have made gun permits confidential, 12 states treat them as open public records and 10 states generally do not grant permits to carry concealed weapons, according to the National Rifle Association.

Fair enough. But “open public records” != “published in a newspaper’s searchable database”. There is a massive difference between having to go down to the appropriate office, identify yourself, fill out the forms, fork over the money, wait, and sift through all of the data; and running a simple search from the comfort of your own computer. Far be it for a journalist to admit to the truth, though.

One of the hotspots in the fight is Memphis, where The Commercial Appeal in December posted a searchable online database listing the names of those with concealed-weapons permits.

*headdesk* Apparently the staff of the Commercial Appeal (who seem to have finally figured it out) did not bother educating this writer on the fact that Tennessee Handgun Carry Permits do not specify that our handguns have to be concealed. Silly me, expecting journalists to do their homework and possibly know what they are talking about…

The newspaper’s action drew little attention until the Feb. 8 arrest of Harry Coleman, 59, who was charged with second-degree murder in the shooting death of Robert “Dutch” Schwerin, 52, after the two men argued over how close their vehicles were parked. The newspaper noted that Coleman was “granted a state permit to carry a handgun in June 2006.”

It could be that the database drew little attention because the newspaper neither mentioned it, nor linked to it, before that February 8 article – as far as the Internet knew or cared, the database did not exist. However, just because no one complained for two months, that does not make the database appropriate, right, or acceptable; it just means no one knew about it.
Furthermore, using the database to determine whether or not a murderer has a handgun carry permit does not justify publishing the entire database in an easy-to-search format. Even granting Sevesteen‘s point that the presence of a database is relevant to such an article, the fact that the murderer in question possessed one could have simply been printed, with an indication that the information originated from a records request with the Tennessee Department of Safety. Coincidentally, this would not have invaded over 200,000 law-abiding citizens’ privacy, this would not have generated such a public outcry against the newspaper, and this would not have created such massive public support for the laws to make this information confidential. Instead, publishing the database seems to have done all those things, and more.

Readers began demanding to know how newspaper reporters knew who had gun permits. What followed was a blizzard of angry letters, e-mails and phone calls.

Again with the “angry” bit… I guess if you say it enough times, it must be true, right? Even accepting that some of the letters/e-mails/phone calls might have actually been angry, can you really blame them? These people’s names, addresses, dates of birth, and license information were exposed to the world to see, for no better reason than a newspaper looking to drum up some publicity. I am not saying that their anger is excused, but it certainly is explainable.
I have to take the next paragraph in two sections, for reasons that will become apparent.

Commercial Appeal Editor Chris Peck said that what followed was an “ugly” week in which gun-rights organizations “fanned the frenzy against our Web site posting of the permit-to-carry list.”

[sneeze]Bullshit![/sneeze]. It was webloggers and online forums that brought this entire situation to national attention, and it was both of those vectors that orchestrated and organized our efforts against the privacy-invading database. The NRA and the TFA did, eventually, get on-scene, but over a full day after the ball had been launched into the stratosphere by the webloggers and forum posters around Tennessee, and both organization’s news releases were little more than, “This newspaper published your information, and this is what you can do about it.” Hardly “fanning the flames”.
But, then, the staff of the Commercial Appeal has never exactly had a close relationship with the truth…

Some people posted maps online showing the locations of the top newspaper executives’ homes, raising fears among the staff of violence.

Ho. Ly. CRAP! You have just got to be kidding me!? These self-righteous prats publish the personal information of over 218,000 law-abiding citizens of Tennessee, including full names, birthdates (this was later changed to only birthyear), full addresses (this was later changed to city/state/zip), and permit issuance and expiration dates, and they have the unmitigated nerve to complain about some of those wronged citizens posting online maps to their homes (which, by the way, is public information, available through numerous legal channels)? Look, you hypocritical idiots, the data you published in your privacy-invading database not only provides sufficient information for anyone to find maps showing the locations of those 218,000+ law-abiding citizens, but it also indicates that these citizens probably have high-value items whcih could be stolen and then misused by criminals.
If you half-witted morons are having “fears … of violence”, just think of how the 218,000+ people whose lives you invaded are feeling right now. Just think of how much those law-abiding, private citizens appreciate your actions, and how your actions have possibly endangered them and their families.
The staff of the Commercial Appeal has absolutely no place, no basis, and no standing from which to complain about people using the White Pages to look them up, when that same staff seems to be doing everything possible to endanger a substantial percentage of Tennessee’s population. Once they take down their offensive database, then, and only then, may they complain about other people posting their information online. Until then, they are nothing more than spineless hypocrites, and I have no sympathy for them, whatsoever. Maybe now the realization of what this kind of publication does to people will convince them to change their minds.

However, Peck said the newspaper has no plans to remove the database from its Web site. The Commercial Appeal is owned by the E.W. Scripps Co., also owner of Scripps Howard News Service.

Or not. Apparently journalists (or maybe just Chris Peck) are too narcissistic to think of anyone but themselves and their notoriety. Somehow, this does not surprise me.

Frank Gibson, executive director of the pro-press Tennessee Coalition for Open Government, said journalists have used the database to show that state officials do “a lousy job” keeping gun permits from people with mental-health problems. “The fact that these records are public” allowed the press to prove that the Tennessee Department of Safety “was issuing permits to convicted felons.”

Ahh, yes, the beauty of “lies by omission”. Yes, the Tennessee Department of Safety was issuing permits to convicted felons, but there is just a little more to the story. The journalists in question (who just happened to be employed by the Commercial Appeal, mind you) found that nine permits were issued to Shelby County residents who just happened to be felons. Nine permits, out of over 18,000 total permits – an error percentage of approximately 0.05%. Yeah, that is the end of the world. I honestly believe that any failure in the system when it comes to a situation like Handgun Carry Permits is unacceptable, but given that we are talking about the government issuing these permits, and our state government having to talk with the federal government and various other agencies, accidents are going to happen, and any belief otherwise is just plain stupidity. In this case, those nine permits were issued because the Tennessee Department of Safety lost its subscription to the FBI’s National Crime and Information Center database for about a year. Furthermore, at the time of writing the article concerning those nine erroneous permits, the Tennessee Department of Safety was already reviewing their records, and had already sent out 99 revocation letters, so it is quite possible that those nine permits would have eventually be revoked.
So, a government system broke, the government made some mistakes, and the government was trying to fix them… and journalists are trying to use this as justification to invade citizens’ privacy? How does that make sense? If you have a problem with the way a government or governmental agency is doing its job (or not, as the case may be), then contact their office and express your displeasure – after all, they work for you. However, do not take it upon yourself to infringe on the privacy of over 218,000 people, potentially endangering some or all of them, and bloody well do not have the nerve to think that the “people” will thank you for this invasion.
Again, open records are one thing, and the journalists in question could have determined the faulty nature of those nine permits without publishing the database for the world to see. But that publishing was completely unnecessary and unwarranted, and the consequences of doing so (for example, the laws proposed to seal off those public records) are entirely on the journalists’ heads, and the heads of everyone on the staff at the Commercial Appeal.

But dozens of state lawmakers are unsympathetic to these arguments as they push bills to end public access to gun permits in Alabama, Arkansas, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Virginia.

Could it be that these lawmakers are “unsympathetic” because their constituents, the people they are supposed to be representing, are royally pissed off at how journalists, newspapers, and other media outlets have been using and abusing the concept of “public records”? No, that could never be the explanation…

“Citizens deserve privacy and the general public has no legitimate interest in knowing who does and does not have a concealed-weapons permit,” said Oregon state Rep. Jeff Barker, a Democrat.

I am pleasantly surprised at the number of Democrats who are interested in preserving their constituents’ rights to self-defense, although, to be honest, that concept should have never devolved to a Democrat/Republican divide. The concept of a human’s right to self-defense is one that all people should be able and willing to recognize, though it is certainly understandable how those individuals of decidedly liberal tendencies would be quick to overlook or ignore it.
The article goes on, indicating how good of a chance these laws have to pass based on the number of legislators in the Tennessee government who have handgun carry permits, and then calling them out by name. For reasons previously mentioned on this weblog, I will not copy-paste that segment.
Phew. Same old specious arguments. Same old general-purpose stupidity. Nothing new. And yet they keep repeating it… I guess the media has just gotten too accustomed to the concept that if they say it, it must be true.
Unfortunately for them, that simply is no longer the case. People like me will never have the exposure that major newspapers do, but even voices in the wildness can reach large audiences these days, and we certainly are not going away, much to those newspapers’ chagrin.