A letter has appeared from Janet Hasson the publisher of The Journal News explaining why the paper has decided to take the gun permit map down.
Her letter doesn’t hold water, yet she’s trying to spin taking the map down as a victory.
Read the comments after her letter and It’s pretty obvious that the heat must have been and will hopefully continue to be withering against her and the paper.
To our readers:
In the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings, The Journal News thought the community should know where gun permit holders in their community were, in part to give parents an opportunity to make careful decisions about their children’s safety.
The Journal News mapped the public database of permit holders, placing a dot on the address of every permit holder in Westchester and Rockland counties and providing the name and street address of each holder. The dots conveyed a powerful message: gun permit holders are everywhere in our counties.
But public reaction to the posting of names and street addresses was swift and divided. Many in the community expressed their gratitude for The Journal News’ decision to make the information available, but permit holders were outraged at what they considered to be an invasion of privacy. Gun owners from across the country vocally conveyed their anger and accused The Journal News of having exposed permit holders and non-permit holders alike to the risk of burglaries and other crimes. Hundreds of threats were made to Journal News staffers.
So intense was the opposition to our publication of the names and addresses that legislation passed earlier this week in Albany included a provision allowing permit holders to request confidentiality and imposing a 120-day moratorium on the release of permit holder data.
Today The Journal News has removed the permit data from lohud.com. Our decision to do so is not a concession to critics that no value was served by the posting of the map in the first place. On the contrary, we’ve heard from too many grateful community members to consider our decision to post information contained in the public record to have been a mistake. Nor is our decision made because we were intimidated by those who threatened the safety of our staffers. We know our business is a controversial one, and we do not cower.
But the database has been public for 27 days and we believe those who wanted to view it have done so already. As well, with the passage of time, the data will become outdated and inaccurate.
Equally important, the legislature has weighed in on the issue and representatives of residents from across the state have said that some New Yorkers who hold gun permits should have the right to keep that information private. As a news organization, we are constantly defending the public’s right to know. Consequently we do not endorse the way the legislature has chosen to limit public access to gun permit data. The statute is very broad and allows anyone who meets certain criteria within qualifying categories to keep their permit information private. When the moratorium concludes, far fewer permit holders will be identifiable, and those who want to know which houses on their block may have guns will not be able to get that information. But we are not deaf to voices who have said that new rules should be set for gun permit data.
Make no mistake, The Journal News will continue to report aggressively on gun ownership. We will continue to pursue our request for data from Putnam County, and will closely analyze the data for Westchester and Rockland counties when it once again becomes publicly available. And we will keep a snapshot of our map — with all its red dots — on our website to remind the community that guns are a fact of life we should never forget.
Sincerely,Janet Hasson
President and Publisher
Journal News Media Group
Here is the link to the article.
http://www.lohud.com/article/20130118/NEWS02/301180125/Letter-from-publisher-gun-map
They’ve removed the map and the information about the gun permits because the law said they have to.
Sadly, this is rather like locking the barn after the horses have escaped, there are no doubt copies replicated on countless servers, blogs, and on private computers worldwide.
In short The Journal News has created a situation that can never be undone.
In other related news there is this from ProjectVeritas
The video is about 10 minutes long and it’s very interesting to note a couple of things…
First, not one of the editors/reporters who describe themselves as anti-gun will place a sign on their lawns saying that their homes are essentially gun free zones
Second, a large percentage of the editors/reporters either have armed guards at their homes or they’ll call the police at the “drop of a hat”.
Talk about people that think nothing of the safety of others (regardless of what they say) but when it comes to their personal safety all the sudden their concerns about guns vanish.
I guess this is what Über liberalism is all about.
I’m reminded of the line from Plan 9 from Outer Space. “All you people of Earth are idiots” I supposed we could revise that line to read “All you non-liberals are idiots, you’re either with us or you’re racist morons!”