Well, bugger.
My morning weblog crawl brought me this news report from Jeff at Alphecca who, even though he lives in Vermont, beat me to it:
The bill to close public access to records identifying Tennessee’s 220,000-plus handgun-carry permit holders fell three votes short of winning approval in the state Senate on Wednesday night.
…
Although the bill is technically not dead, the legislature is struggling to adjourn its 2009 session today and Minority Leader Jim Kyle, D-Memphis, said it will take a two-thirds vote of the 33-member Senate to resurrect it. Although it received a favorable 14-13 vote, it takes 17 votes, a majority, to pass legislation.
I guess this means the Commercial Appeal can continue maintaining and updating their privacy-invading database of handgun carry permit holders in Tennessee, and we permit-holders are stuck with the fate of having our personal information published all over the internet, simply because we dared to take responsibility for our own safety.
I want to address one particular quote in the article Jeff linked to:
“It’s possible, but I am bothered by the fact that there are apparently political campaigns and candidates that want to use the database for their purposes. I find that as offensive as data mining for gun control purposes,” [Senate Majority Leader Mark] Norris said after the vote.
I could not have said it better myself, Senator Norris. I see absolutely no reason why I should be spammed, by anyone, simply because I want to be able to defend my wife and myself. We already get a metric ton of gos-se in the mail as it is already… why would I want to allow the government to make that situation worse?
WizardPC handled the TFA’s stance (and the miserepresentation of that stance by the media) on this topic yesterday, so I will not rehash it (though I will point out that post was picked up across the blogosphere – not a bad start for a new writer, neh?). But I will say this much for myself: keeping records open to the public just so lobbyists, advertisers, campaigners, and spammers (but I repeat myself) can contact people is flat-out ludicrous. If I wanted your spam, I would have asked you for it.
And for all of those “open government” advocates out there, I would point out this simple little fact: driver’s license records are closed, at the government level, here in Tennessee. You would be unable to publish a database of driver’s license holders’ information online, because the state is not permitted to release that information. So why should handgun carry permits be any different? From the safety standpoint, automobile drivers kill far more people than handgun carry permit holders do every year. From the governmental oversight standpoint, how do we know that the government suspends/recalls a person’s license effectively/accurately if the records are closed? If it is sufficient for one…
At any rate, when it comes to this year’s legislation concerning firearms, we pro-rights folks may have lost the battle to restore our right to privacy, but we pretty much won the rest of the war. We had our right to lawfully defend ourselves in restaurants that serve alcohol restored, we will no longer be arrested for going to the range with firearms and ammunition in our trunks, our right to lawfully defend ourselves in state parks has been restored (though we need to work on preempting local parks), and while it may not account for much, the Tennessee Firearms Freedom Act passed. Having my privacy invaded and my family endangered by a bigoted newspaper editor with a vendetta still irks me like you would not believe, but I will surely take what I can get now, and work on the rest next year.
And there is always next year.
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