Posted on 01/07/2013 7:16:22 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Just before Christmas, the local newspaper in New York’s tony Westchester and Rockland Counties decided to respond to the horrific shootings in nearby Newton, Conn., with its own version of insanity.
The Journal News published an interactive “gun map” showing the names and addresses of thousands of local residents who have handgun permits. The article’s headline read, “The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don’t Know about the Weapons in Your Neighborhood.” The paper explained that it had obtained the records by filing Freedom of Information Act requests with local officials. Publisher Janet Hasson defended the paper’s move by stating, “We felt that sharing information about gun permits in our area was important in the aftermath of the Newtown shootings.”
Judging from the outraged response, most of the paper’s readers and many local officials disagree. Putnam County Clerk Dennis Sant, announcing he would not follow the lead of officials in Westchester and Rockland Counties, has refused to turn over records to the paper. By listing the addresses of homes without guns, the paper has effectively drawn a map for criminals, telling them which places to rob and “endangering our citizens,” Sant said. County executive Mary Ellen Odell called the publication “reckless.” One high-ranking official in Westchester County I spoke with notes that the newspaper has put legitimate gun owners on an equal footing with sex offenders and other criminals. “Maybe I’d like to see a map published of those accused of defrauding the county government, but I’d never expect a paper to print one,” he says.
Some local officials say that anyone who has had contact with ex-criminals — including prosecutors, judges, jurors, and police — could feel threatened now. Aron Wieder, a Democratic county legislator in Rockland County, fears for his safety now that people know he doesn’t own a handgun. He applied for a pistol permit last week. “I never owned a gun, but now I have no choice,” he told reporters in a news conference Friday. “I’ll do anything, anything to protect my family.”
Rockland County sheriff Louis Falco told Newsday that he was appalled to learn that inmates at the county’s jail were taunting guards in the days after the Journal News published its map. “They have inmates coming up to them and telling them exactly where they live,” Falco said. “That’s not acceptable to me.” Charlotte Swift, of Orangetown, says she experienced a flood of emotion when she first saw the list: “I originally obtained a gun permit because I had previously been married to a man who attempted to strangle me. . . . The first emotion I felt was, ‘Oh my gosh, he can find me.’”
Ironically, some of the harshest critics of the Journal News’s decision to publish the map are former burglars, such as Walter T. Shaw, an ex-burglar whom the FBI blames for more than 3,000 break-ins during the 1960s and 1970s. Shaw told Fox News: “Having a list of who has a gun is like gold — why rob that house when you can hit the one next door, where there are no guns?”
Equally disturbing, crooks who need weapons now know exactly where they can steal them. “Guns are on the top of the list of what you want to steal,” Bob Portenier, a former armed house robber, told Fox. “They can sell them to a gangbanger who ends up killing someone.”
But such arguments make no impression on knee-jerk supporters of gun control. In Connecticut, Democratic representative Stephen Dargan, the co-chair of the legislature’s public-safety committee, has introduced a bill to make public the names and addresses of 170,000 people who hold handgun permits in the state.
“I don’t know why a responsible gun owner is worried about whether a permit for a revolver is FOI-able or not,” he told reporters. In his view, it’s reasonable for people to want such information. “Maybe their kids are going over to Johnny Smith’s, and maybe they want to see whether they have guns in the house,” he suggested.
Richard Burgess, head of a local group that advocates for Second Amendment rights, says Dargan’s bill is nonsensical. Homeowners with rifles or shotguns don’t need permits in the state, he observed to a Hartford Courant reporter, so no one would know if those weapons were in a home. “So, really, you’re not getting a benefit out of it, and you’re only putting the gun owner in danger.”
Liberals such as Dargan don’t see anything wrong in publicly shaming those who legally own guns. When it comes to their own personal safety, though, they are far more sensitive.
Take the Journal News executives who decided to publish the gun map. The newspaper was so inundated with complaints that shortly after Christmas it took extra security precautions and hired security guards — who were armed — to patrol its Rockland County headquarters. The executives reported no incidents of any kind at the building, but they turned over at least two e-mails they found troubling. The local police said they didn’t find the e-mails threatening and concluded that they “did not constitute an offense.” The Journal News chose not to share with its readers the information that it had hired armed security guards. That revelation came from a competing newspaper, the Rockland County Times, which concluded that the Journal News conducts itself according to the double standard: “Guns are good for the goose but not for the gander.”
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist for NRO.
I think I’d like to publish one called “The Liberal Next Door: What You Don’t Know about the A$$holes in Your Neighborhood.”
What I’d like to see published are the names and addresses of everyone who works on the paper and who approved and wrlte the article. Surely someone has this information and is willing to share.
The Westchester county tax assessors office is a good place to start http://orpts.tax.ny.gov/cfapps/MuniPro/muni_theme/county/county.cfm?swis=55
Unfortunately there isn’t a county wide listing, but there are about 30 sublistings that would have to be searched, but those few in NY who actually believe in the constitution could look there as a way to out the addresses of the jerks who put them at risk. Publishing those addresses on a web site would give the bastards at the paper a taste of their own medicine.
I wonder how THEY like it.
ALL the kid killers were on psychoactive drugs... with the blessing of idiot liberals who see mind mucking drugs as ‘the answer’...
http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/the-giant-gaping-hole-in-sandy-hook-reporting/
Guns have been with us for hundreds of years... schools for thousands.
Psychoactive drugs came into being right around the time crazed kids started mass killings.
Connect dots.
ALL the kid killers were on psychoactive drugs... with the blessing of idiot liberals who see mind mucking drugs as ‘the answer’...
http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/the-giant-gaping-hole-in-sandy-hook-reporting/
Guns have been with us for hundreds of years... schools for thousands.
Psychoactive drugs came into being right around the time crazed kids started mass killings.
Connect dots.
Typical liberal hypocrisy.
There is a very simple solution to this, publish the names and addresses of the Journal News executives and reporters on-line. That will end such irresponsible actions.
20 years ago there was no internet so the papers had the only weapon, but now we are armed too.
Fight fire w fire I say.
Lets get this newspaper declared a “Gun Free Zone” and have all the guards dis-armed (one might go crazy you know and start shooting folks). Just like the school was.
There's an upside to this. The moonbats are losing all pretense of being mainstream.
Map: Where are the Journal News employees in your neighborhood? By Robert Cox on Wed, 12/26/2012 -
Pretty cool, has their name, work email, work phone and home addresses when you click on each map marker to their homes.
As a kid I delivered this rag. It was a pos then and only got worse. Hopefully it will go bankrupt
Since they since hired armed gaurds I would say they don’t like it one bit. The irony is obvious but they probably don’t get it.
Tit for tat. Good job.
“...Aron Wieder, a Democratic county legislator in Rockland County, fears for his safety now that people know he doesn’t own a handgun....I’ll do anything, anything to protect my family...”
Now you know the rest of us feel.
Welcome to the Party, PAL...
Janet Hasson
Publisher, Journal News
3 Gate House Lane
Mamaroneck, NY 10534
(914) 694-5204
This appeared online.
If someone wants to circulate a Google Maps image of this location, please do so.
If someone can find an email address associated with the above, please include it.
Maybe tonight if I cant find it here I will post it as a blog or news thread.
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