Thursday, December 27, 2012

Blogger Turns Tables on Newspaper that Published Map of Gun Owners

Real estate blogger Christopher Fountain has published the names and addresses in interactive form of all the employees of the newspaper, Journal News. JN earlier this week  published the interactive maps of names and addresses of people in Westchester and Rockland counties in New York, who have gun licenses.

Politico reports:
In an accompanying piece, [JN] had said that some citizens “would like lawmakers to expand the amount of information the public can find out about gun owners” after the Newtown massacre.

Fountain swung back at that response.

“Well, she could have just published the number of gun permits, which is actually quite small, if she wanted to show an issue that there are 2,000 legally registered guns in her county, fine,” he said. “But the fact that they put the addresses — I’ve received e-mails from abused women who were under protective order and in hiding and they’re terribly afraid that now their names and addresses are all over the Internet and accessible through that map.”

He added that he was giving the paper a taste of its own medicine.

“The media has been exposing, harassing personal details of people for a long time,” Fountain said. “I don’t believe I’m escalating, I believe I’m punching back.

“My original point in posting this was to just show those particular reporters and the publisher what it feels like,” he continued.

5 comments:

  1. So if I cross-reference the list against the licensed gun owner list, I can see which employees of the newspaper DO NOT own a gun. Interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. As Lew Rockwell would say: "Heroic!!!"

    ReplyDelete
  3. The media sensationalism on gun ownership is akin to the sensationalism of the weather. Ooooh! There is weather happening outside! Ooooh!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Does this list include the police or bodyguards? Publish their home addresses too.

    ReplyDelete