The Journal News Saves the Earth! Not!

You have no doubt heard by now that The Journal News, a daily paper in a northern suburb of New York City, published the information of all the registered gun owners in two counties in New York. This included their addresses along with a handy little map with all those addresses plotted on it. The article was entitled “The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don’t Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood.”

The names and quotes and specific information cited here came from a New York Times article. Of course, their take on it is a bit different than mine, but there is no accounting for their idiocy. They think publishing the names of our spies for all the world to see is a good thing, too.

The Journal News article was hailed by the usual liberal idiots and anti-gun crowd as “courageous” and “a great public service”.  Blah, blah blah.

Then the reaction from the pro-gun side kicked in. Bloggers researched and published on the internet the names and addresses of the editors and reporters for the paper. Those courageous icons of journalism at the Journal News received phone calls, letters, and emails in protest, and not a few threats of violence.  The president and publisher of the paper, Janet Hasson, whined that “…in the U.S. journalists should not be threatened,” and in the meantime has hired armed guards to protect her and others at the paper’s offices.

One must enjoy the irony of it all. I mean, the result of publishing the names and addresses of registered gun owners was bound to make those owners uncomfortable. We can’t be sure, but the paper must have known that by exposing these gun owners there was a possibility that the public reaction to those gun owners would be negative and they would be hounded by anti-gun folks. Now the worm has turned.

The usual commentators were quick to defend the paper on the grounds that the information was a matter of public record and the paper has the right to publish this information. Forgoing the obvious arguments about why the information even exists to be published, we must agree that The Journal News does indeed have the right to publish the information. Bully for them.

Of course, that does not mean that publishing it was a good idea. In fact, it was a very bad idea for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is that it was guaranteed to piss off a sizable portion of the population, many of which are going to be vocal about their displeasure and some even violent about it.

I’m not defending the crazies who threaten violence and death to the paper’s employees. But, any reasonable person understands those crazies are out there, both on the left and right, and if you go out of your way to piss them off, bad things could happen. I am also not saying that journalists should cower from the threats offered by the crazies. Trust me, I can practically hear the cries of indignation around the theme that if journalists are silenced by the threats from their critics then that results in anarchy. True. The other side of the coin is that when journalists exercise their power only for their own bias, without regard to the harm it causes others, and are not accountable in any way, that is also a form of anarchy.

You have to understand that if you have a right to publish something, others have a right to disagree with it and the form of their disagreement may be painful. There is plenty of pain without violence.  Pain will come in other ways. It will come in the form of reduced circulations from people upset with the paper’s actions. It will come from the boycotts being organized against the advertisers in the paper, some of whom will decide they don’t need that kind of attention. It will come from the outraged voices of decent people who will yell loud and long about what they think of the publisher, editors and reporters. Some of those folks could end up losing their jobs if the parent corporation, Gannett, begins to feel too much heat. Longer term, it results in the further erosion of the public trust and confidence in American liberal journalism of today. 

Let’s not overlook the pain that comes from the threat of violence, too, however unjustified it is. Violence committed against journalists is seldom justified. (You can’t say it is never justified, because I can think of scenarios where it might be)  I’m sure many of the employees’ of the Journal News are worried, and probably with good reason. If you are the Lady Garden’s Club reporter, you have to wonder just what the hell is going on and that this isn’t what you signed up for. The fear and trepidation the employees of the Journal News are feeling is, however, pretty much self inflicted by their leaders. What did they think was going to happen? When the majority of Americans favor gun rights and the second amendment, did the editors really think they wouldn’t get a backlash? Could they not imagine the potential harm they were doing and that people would be kind of upset?

What harm? Well, there is the obvious fact that guns are always a target for thieves, so the paper just published a treasure map where thieves are likely to find some. Inevitably, some of those guns will be stolen by thieves relying on the information published in the Journal News article. Not only will the legal guns owners suffer the loss of their property and the indignity and personal violation of being robbed, those stolen guns will go from their law abiding responsible citizens—who after all complied with a questionably unconstitutional law requiring them to register their guns-- into the hands of criminals to be used in the furtherance of their crimes. It is not inconceivable that some innocent person is going to get shot with one of those guns that would not have been so shot but for the Journal News article and map. A stretch? Maybe, but also maybe not. No doubt the Journal News started with the premise that public knowledge of the gun owners in the neighborhood somehow makes that neighborhood safer, yet exactly the opposite will in fact manifest.

There is the opposite problem as well. Rapists and such, and thieves not interested in stealing guns, don’t like it when their potential victims could be armed. Guess what potential victims are now reasonably known not to be armed? The answer is the people whose addresses are not shown on the map provided by the Journal News.

The publisher, editor and reporters of The Journal News responsible for this are staggeringly stupid. Congratulations Journal News, in one fell swoop you managed to heighten the risk for almost all of the citizens in two counties. But, oh yes, you had a right to do it, and we all know that when one exercises his constitutional rights he should never be questioned or criticized for doing so. More importantly, none of the bad things that are going to happen as a direct result of your journalistic masturbation are in any way your responsibility, right?

Dwight Worley is the reporter who had the idea to publish the gun owner’s names and addresses. When asked about criticism of the article and whether the databases of the registered owners should not be available to the public, he confirmed just how amazingly stupid he is. He said, “The people have as much of a right to know who owns guns in their communities as gun owners have to own weapons.”

There is no such right to the knowledge about others possessions. Where does he think this right comes from; it certainly isn’t in the Constitution, unlike the right to keep and bear arms.

Do we have the right to know which housewives have vibrators in their purses? Do we have a right to know which men have a prescription for Viagra? Yes I know that vibrators are not subject to governmental registration, which is the basis for the point the Journal News and its supporters make that information collected by the government is therefore owned by the public and should be publicly available. But Viagra is subject to registration and all those with a prescription for it are so recorded. So where is the difference? Hey man, one of those old guys is going to have a bad reaction to the little blue pill someday, get one of those erections lasting more than four hours while in the meantime coming into close proximity to a 16 year old in a tight sweater and short skirt and the next thing you know that Thing will go off and tragedy ensue. As long as we know which men out there have access to Viagra we can all take steps to protect ourselves, or at lease our 16 year old daughters. Same logic.

How would Mr. Worley like it if suddenly the State of New York said he was going to have to register as a Catholic, or Jew, or Baptist, or Scientologist, or Atheist, or something, not because they wanted to take his constitutional right to practice his religion, which they assure he is free to do without impediment, but because sometimes religious nuts prove to be a threat to the rest of us and this registration will make us all safer from them. And, besides, we all have a right to know what religion our neighbors practice, so of course, the registration list will be publicly available. Same logic.

Clearly, too many folks think it is not only okay for the government to require registration of firearms and even require permits for them, but that it is incumbent on government to do so for the protection of us all. They believe we are all safer as a result. Why, if they weren’t forced to register their handguns, the owners of those guns would feel no compunction about shooting anyone they please whenever they please, because they would have no fear of being caught. But now that they know that we know who they are because they registered their guns, they are forced to restrain themselves. To paraphrase a poster making the rounds, if you believe that requiring a permit and registering lawful citizen’s guns means that criminals won’t have guns or that you are somehow safer, then you are a special kind of stupid.

My apologies for digressing.

I don’t know if the Journal News was motivated by an anti-gun bias or if they were just interested in creating buzz to sell more newspapers and advertising. Coming on the heels of the Newtown massacre, and that Worley was returning from covering the story when he had the idea for the publishing the gun owners database, one must think the Journal News was acting on an anti-gun bias. It’s just plain mercenary and cold blooded if they were manufacturing a sensational story because of Newtown just to sell more newspapers. Or maybe they thought it was a twofer? That's somehow even worse.

Either way, they seriously misunderstood what they were doing. I think the newspaper and its employees are going to be worse off for it. It can’t be pleasant for them now. I think the citizens of those two counties are going to be worse off, too, or at least their risk is much heightened and now they will have to be especially vigilant.

The question is if the crime rate goes up in those New York counties and innocent people are harmed because the bad guys now have a literal road map to follow, will Mr.Worley and Ms.Hasson blame themselves? Will they lay awake at night and think to themselves, “I sure wish I hadn’t done that.” Or will they blame someone else? Knowing how these liberal journalists think they will blame right wing nut gun owners because everyone knows they don't care about the well being of others, just about themselves and their precious outdated rights. Do you see the sophomoric logic they will employ? If those gun owners hadn't owned those guns in the first place, none of this would have happened. Right?