Guns: A newspaper’s controversial crusade

Local newspapers are always looking for “stories that will bring them national attention,” said Christine Haughney in The New York Times, but the Journal News in suburban New York “may have gotten more than it bargained for.” In the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Conn., the Journal News published an interactive map on its website listing the names and addresses of 33,614 registered gun owners in Westchester and Rockland counties. The list swiftly “drew outrage across the country,” with gun-rights advocates denouncing it as an effort to cast aspersions on law-abiding gun owners. Ever since, said Erik Wemple in WashingtonPost.com, the paper’s editors and writers have been deluged with threats. Angry bloggers have published the addresses, home phone numbers, and other personal information of dozens of Journal News employees, including where some staffers’ kids go to school.Armed guards, ironically, have now been hired to protect the staff. Why again did the newspaper kick this hornets’ nest?

It was trying to give readers valuable information, said the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger in an editorial. When your child goes to a sleepover, or your daughter heads off to babysit, would you want to know if there were guns on the premises? What if, before the horror of Sandy Hook, someone who knew the troubled Adam Lanza learned that his mother kept guns, and put in a “cautionary call to the local police?” The Journal News did nothing wrong, said Emily Bazelon in Slate.com. Gun permits are public records under New York law, and there’s no shame or harm in making this information available. In fact, “if you own a gun for self-defense, isn’t there some benefit in telling would-be home invaders that you have one?”

No, there isn’t, said John Fund in NationalReview.com. Some criminals deliberately target homes with guns in order to steal them. At the same time, the paper has helpfully informed burglars which homeowners don’t have guns and thus pose no lethal threat during a break-in. It gets worse: Prison inmates can now learn the exact street addresses of their gun-owning guards. Women who fled abusive relationships and bought guns for protection have had their whereabouts revealed to their ex-partners. Had the newspaper’s editors thought this through, these implications might have been obvious. But to “knee-jerk supporters of gun control,” all gun owners are evil, and ripe targets for shaming.

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