-By Warner Todd Huston
The New York newspaper that made itself infamous for publishing an interactive, Internet-based map revealing the names and addresses of thousands of New York’s law abiding gun owners has now disabled the feature that allows viewers to see those names and addresses.
The Westchester area newspaper caused outrage among New York’s legal gun owners with its anti-gun stunt as the story surged across the country. Citing public safety issues, as late as last Tuesday a group of 50 current and former law enforcement officials gathered to demand that the Journal News remove the names.
As soon as the map became an issue, legislators began efforts to change the state’s laws to make it illegal to out gun owner’s names. Even though such a law has yet to be put in place, the Journal News has decided to remove the names and addresses on its own citing the “spirit” of the laws under consideration as well as a provision in the state’s latest anti-gun law that passed earlier this week.
New York’s newest gun law contains a provision for gun owners to request that personal information be excluded from public databases and it was this provision to which the Journal News reacted.
“With the passage this week of the NYSAFE gun law, which allows permit holders to request their names and addresses be removed from the public record, we decided to remove the gun permit data from lohud.com at 5 pm today,” the paper said in a statement released by the Manhattan PR firm it hired to handle media inquiries.
Later that day Journal News publisher Janet Hasson posted a letter to the public on the paper’s website.
In her letter, Hasson was unbowed in her desire to continue the attack against the state’s legal gun owners despite the new law passed and the outrage expressed over her paper’s actions.
The Journal News publisher also made no mention of the several cases of home invasion and burglary of homes of gun owners that appeared on her paper’s map.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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