After the tragic mass shooting and murder of school kids and teachers in Newtown in December, the anti-gun brigade didn't waste a moment to come out calling for strict gun control measures. After all, strike while the gun is still hot - and never let a crisis go to waste, is the motto of these activists. And BTW people, it is not the guns fault. No dear idiots, it was the mentally-challenged guy pulling the trigger who was to blame, but I guess it's so much easier going after an inanimate object, rather than going after the shooter and his mental problems. And when will people wake up. Most of these shootings occur in gun-free zones like schools, malls and cinema's. I wonder why? How about having teachers armed (as they are in Israel) or having armed guards at schools? I can guarantee you the next coward who wants to die and be a media-frenzy hero will think twice if they know a school is armed. And the media is also to blame because they run a 24-hour news cycle for weeks about the tragedies, hashing and re-hashing and harassing the survivors and the victims families, which only encourages other mentally-challenged cowards to want to go down in a famous blaze of media-glory. Wise up people.
And while we're about it, let's just put a few stats and some perspective on the table here with these figures:
Part of the anti-gun brigade is of course America's most beloved Dear Leader - Obama. These radical Marxists are all the same - they need to control the population and those pesky guns just keep getting in the way. So, following the lead from the top, all the other radicals have climbed out of the woodwork to add their 2 cents and present a united outraged force calling for gun control.
But, at the forefront of taking it to the next level was The Journal News, a daily publication based north of New York. They went and published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders in two suburban counties (Rockland and Westchester) AND an interactive map with their individual locations - because they felt that people should know who has a gun (friggin idiots). My first thought when I saw this was how dumb can you be? They have just made it easier for criminals to go gun shopping - AND they've just made it easier for criminals to target unarmed homes. And see, I'm not even as clever as a liberal and even I could see the stupidity of these wankers.
Well, as you can imagine, the peeps whose details were published aren't too happy about it. Never mind that the published information is about 25% inaccurate due to people dying or moving away; but, they are now at an increased risk for crime. There have been reports that active and former police members, lawyers, and jail guards are now at higher risk of attack as their perps now have their home addresses and know if they're armed or not. Also being reported is that people who have managed to hide from stalkers or violent partners have now been exposed. I guess these idiot wanker liberal 'journalists' didn't think of the consequences of their actions - which is just so typical of them.
Well, another unintended consequence to this stupidity has been that people have felt it necessary to publish The Journal News' staff home addresses too. Well, fairs fair right? I mean, if they thought it prudent to warn the public of gun owners in their neighbourhoods, then it's only fair their own home addresses and other details be published. And I'm pretty sure that these homes would be unarmed (just saying....hear that criminals?).
In fact, days after The Journal News published all this information, they started receiving threats. Gee, I guess they also didn't think of that either. Well, so here's the ironic part that I so love. Due to all the threats that were received, the paper’s president and publisher, Janet Hasson, hired ARMED guards for protection! Yes, you read correctly - ARMED guards to protect them. But, but, I thought guns were bad....If that doesn't top the hypocrite of the year award then I'd be surprised.
Good luck The Journal News. I guess we'll see in a few months what the impact will be on your business as people no longer buy your trash rag, and as advertisers flee. Liberals are getting a good lesson here on consequences to actions......it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks!
Local newspapers across the country look for stories that will bring them national attention, but The Journal News, a daily nestled in a wooded office park in a suburb north of New York, may have gotten more than it bargained for.
Two weeks ago, the paper published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders — a total of 33,614 — in two suburban counties, Westchester and Rockland, and put maps of their locations online. The maps, which appeared with the article “The Gun Owner Next Door: What You Don’t Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood,” received more than one million views on the Web site of The Journal News — more than twice as many as the paper’s previous record, about a councilman who had two boys arrested for running a cupcake stand.
But the article, which left gun owners feeling vulnerable to harassment or break-ins, also drew outrage from across the country. Calls and e-mails grew so threatening that the paper’s president and publisher, Janet Hasson, hired armed guards to monitor the newspaper’s headquarters in White Plains and its bureau in West Nyack, N.Y.
Personal information about editors and writers at the paper has been posted online, including their home addresses and information about where their children attended school; some reporters have received notes saying they would be shot on the way to their cars; bloggers have encouraged people to steal credit card information of Journal News employees; and two packages containing white powder have been sent to the newsroom and a third to a reporter’s home (all were tested by the police and proved to be harmless).
“As journalists, we are prepared for criticism,” Ms. Hasson said, as she sat in her meticulously tended office and described the ways her 225 employees have been harassed since the article was published. “But in the U.S., journalists should not be threatened.” She has paid for staff members who do not feel safe in their homes to stay at hotels, offered guards to walk employees to their cars, encouraged employees to change their home telephone numbers and has been coordinating with the local police.
The decision to report and publish the data, taken from publicly available records, happened within a week of the school massacre in nearby Newtown, Conn. On Dec. 17, Dwight R. Worley, a tax reporter, returned from trying to interview the families of victims in Newtown with an idea to obtain and publish local gun permit data. He discussed his idea with his immediate editor, Kathy Moore, who in turn talked to her bosses, according to CynDee Royle, the paper’s editor.
Mr. Worley started putting out requests for public information that Monday, receiving the data from Westchester County that day and from Rockland County three days later. All the editors involved said there were not any formal meetings about the article, although it came up at several regular news meetings. Ms. Royle, who had been at The Journal News in 2006 when the newspaper published similar data, without mapping it or providing street numbers, said that editors discussed publishing the data in at least three meetings.
Ms. Hasson said Ms. Royle told her that an article with gun permit data would be published on Sunday, Dec. 23. While Ms. Hasson had not been at the paper in 2006, she knew there had been some controversy then. She made sure to be available on Dec. 23 by e-mail, and accessible to the staff if any problems came up. A spokesman for Gannett, which owns The Journal News, said it was never informed about the coming article.
“We’ve run this content before,” Ms. Hasson said. “I supported it, and I supported the publishing of the info.”
By Dec. 26, employees had begun receiving threatening calls and e-mails, and by the next day, reporters not involved in the article were being threatened. The reaction did not stop at the local paper: Gracia C. Martore, the chief executive of Gannett, also received threatening messages.
Many of the threats, Ms. Hasson said, were coming from across the country, and not from the paper’s own community. But local gun owners and supporters are encouraging an advertiser boycott of The Journal News. Scott Sommavilla, president of the 35,000-member Westchester County Firearm Owners Association, said 44,000 people had downloaded a list of advertisers from his group’s Web site. But he emphasized that his association would never encourage any personal threats. Appealing to advertisers, he said, is the best way for gun owners to express their disapproval of the article.
“They’re really upset about it,” Mr. Sommavilla said. “They’re afraid for their families.”
The paper’s decision has drawn criticism from journalists who question whether The Journal News should have provided more context and whether it was useful to publish individual names and addresses. Journalists with specialties in computer-assisted reporting have argued that just because public data has become more readily available in recent years does not mean that it should be published raw. In ways, they argued, it would have been more productive to publish data by ZIP code or block.
“The Journal News, I personally think, should have rethought the idea as actually going so far to identify actual addresses,” said Steve Doig, a professor with an expertise in data journalism at Arizona State. “This particular database ought to remain a public record. Just because it’s available and public record doesn’t mean we have to make it so readily available.”
Mr. Worley disagrees. “The people have as much of a right to know who owns guns in their communities as gun owners have to own weapons,” he said.
Mr. Doig pointed out that the recent publication of gun information by other papers has made access to this public information more difficult because legislators started blocking the data immediately. “The backlash, very typically from this, is for legislators to try to close up the access to this type of data.”
Mr. Worley said he had received mainly taunting phone calls sprinkled in with callers who said “you should die.” He found broken glass outside of his home and would not say how much time he was spending there right now. But he said he had largely been supported by the newsroom.
The Journal News’s features editor, Mary Dolan, said that while she was not involved with the publication of the article, her home address and phone numbers were published online in retaliation. She has had to disconnect her phone and has “taken my social media presence and just put it on the shelf for a while.” She has also received angry phone calls from former neighbors in Westchester whose gun information was published.
She said she was especially concerned about the part-time staff members who write up wedding anniversary and church potluck announcements who have been harassed. But she supports the paper for its decision.
“It sparked a conversation that needed to occur in this country, and it revealed tactics that will be employed when gun owners feel their rights are threatened,” she said.
Putnam County has refused to release similar data, but Ms. Hasson said she would continue to press for it. She would not say whether the paper had lost any of its advertisers. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, The Journal News, like many newspapers nationwide, has had sharp declines in circulation. Its total circulation from Monday through Friday fell from 111,536 in September 2007 to 68,850 in September 2012.
At the same time, Ms. Hasson has been trying to calm the nerves of her family after photographs of the home she is renting and references to her adult children were put online.
“They are concerned about my safety,” she said about her children. “But they are very supportive.”
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..the interweb machine....with the help of google maps and social media, a destructive tool as well as a useful tool
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