So criminals can look up addresses before deciding which homes to break and enter? How is this not a good thing for criminals? Sure, less criminals may get shot. But then who are we trying to actually protect here?
Consider an absurd second order effect where, if it's true that you're less likely to be robbed by being on this register, it encourages more people to buy guns, even if it means they don't have to use them.
In Dec 2012, details of gun permits issued in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties just north of NYC were posted on an interactive map [1]. This was a nearly perfect test of the theory that criminal behavior would get worse in response to easy access to this kind of information. I found no news reports indicating people had been targeted one way or the other, and official stats [2] indicate serious crime decreased.
For comparison's sake, it looks like serious crimes decreased in Westchester by 6.8% while the decreased nationally by 5%. IMO, especially considering that difference comes out to a fairly small amount crimes in Westchester, I don't think you can assume there's any causative effect there.
You actually think criminals smart enough to inform themselves with such a list are dumb enough to avoid the houses practically guaranteed to contain some of the easiest to liquidate at FMV objects out there? (guns and ammo)
The thing I never understand about this argument is that there’s a much higher likelihood of significant injury or death (getting shot) robbing the houses with guns, no?
Guns may be “easy to liquidate” (not sure if that’s actually the case) but surely selling Xboxes and MacBooks on eBay is just as profitable?
In all likelihood, CCW-holders will be more likely to be robbed than the general populace, as they possess an item that is in very high demand for criminals, that has a high selling price, and that can be easily and quickly unloaded onto the black market. That's why most don't publicly announce their possession: it's not a deterrent but something that puts a target on your back.
A sufficiently motivated burglar can already prioritize their victims by selecting those with the highest donation amounts on public FEC reports, or simply selecting properties with the highest tax obligations. I wouldn't be surprised if the more enterprising ones already do, which is to say that this doesn't change much.
These threads are always so interesting for how they illustrate the mental space some people invest in criminal threat.
I’ve had a house burgled, two cars broken into, and know several victims of violent crime and still can’t relate even a little bit to the anxiety expressed here or the idea that any of those encounters would have turned out better with an extra gun around.
I don’t mean to challenge your point of view, just to note how huge the divide is between how people fundamentally conceive of this stuff.
I've encountered something similar to this recently as well. There seems to be a conflation of 'petty burglary' with 'home invasion/violent assault/kidnap/rape/murder' in the minds of the average American when it comes attempting to understand their threat model. Most Americans haven't had their home burgled, and the extreme few that have (statistically) are victims of theft, not violent offences against the person.
Most Americans can't wrap their heads around the possibility that they're being burgled by someone who
a) is in need of cash
b) is not interested in killing, torturing, raping or maiming the victim
c) would ideally like to get in and out for a quick financial win
Where I live (Australia) our burglary rate is 5x greater per capita than America. And yet our "murdered by burglar rate" is effectively nil, much like it is in the states. But there are scores of yanks that will talk about their need to have a firearm for home defence to ensure their family isn't murdered by someone who's most likely looking for a bit of cash for a drug fix.
When a person, or persons, decide to break the social contract, there's no telling to what degree they will exceed the boundaries of the law.
A criminal has already demonstrated that they are unwilling to be bound by the rules of civil society.
Are you willing to bet your children's life that their criminal behavior will be limited to that which you deem to be a nuisance, rather than your families' lives?
> When a person, or persons, decide to break the social contract, there's no telling to what degree they will exceed the boundaries of the law.
I disagree. if the above was true the mailbox baseball (remember, a federal offense) to mass murderer pipeline would be much better documented. Also, the vast majority of burglars are non-violent offenders, not blood thirsty home invading rapists.
> A criminal has already demonstrated that they are unwilling to be bound by the rules of civil society.
I think it's more that they're willing to bend the rules of civil society to meet a personal want or need, and they would most likely evaluate that as a risk/reward proposition like any other person does when entering into a risky activity.
>Are you willing to bet your children's life that their criminal behavior will be limited to that which you deem to be a nuisance, rather than your families' lives?
>I'm not.
Interestingly this is the exact conclusion that was presented to me the last time I had this discussion. And my response is the same now as it was then.
Statistically speaking you are much more likely to have a family member die from that firearm in your home you claim is there for protection when compared to the threat of the hypothetical burglar you are protecting your family against.
> Statistically speaking you are much more likely to have a family member die from that firearm in your home you claim is there for protection when compared to the threat of the hypothetical burglar you are protecting your family against.
I think this depends a lot of where you are.
Most of the statistics I've seen has fairly overwhelming support for preventative effects of being armed.
Also, handguns are one of the most powerful forces for equality we've had in modern history.
A smaller woman or man is no longer dependent on a stronger person for defense. Guns are a great equalizer.
As Heinlein said, "An armed society is a polite society".
I think my point still stands. Statistically speaking, you're more likely to have a love one hurt or killed from a firearm accident when compared to falling victim to a violent criminal offence in the home. And I'm not sure how you possessing a handgun would stop a burglary preventatively unless you advertise that you are indeed in possession of a handgun.
Compare that with this report from the Obama administration: http://nap.edu/18319
Annually, firearms in America are used in self defense between 500k and 3M times (real page 26, labeled as 15). Taking these numbers as true, the rate firearms are used in self defense vs. homicide is between 50x and 300x. Americans are substantially more likely to defend themselves with a firearm than to be unlawfully killed by one. They are substantially more likely to defend themselves with a firearm than to be killed in a mass shooting.
Original was 'Attorney General Bonta Releases New Firearms Data to Increase Transparency and Information Sharing'. They absolutely leaked data by failing to secure it properly via tableau, but the headline as written here implies that this was done deliberately. I looked at it last night, you wouldn't have known about it unless you were digging through the page source looking for ways to scrape it.
Negligent at best, possibly deliberate at worst. But that doesn't justify the false impression created by this headline.
Nope, you're wrong. Each tableau dashboard component also had a link to download the underlying source data. You didn't have to even go through the html page source, it was readily available via standard tableau functionality. After it was discovered that the underlying data included PII information, they underlying data was replaced with a csv file missing that data. The csv file even said like "full data - copy.csv". Whether or not they meant to do it, that's open to interpretation. But my headline was accurate.
Thanks for the information about how the data was leaking. But why I disagree with you on the headline is the attribution of intentionality to the leak.
Bonta is ultimately responsible as he's head of the AG's office, but the not-unreasonable premise of the page was just publishing longitudinal statistical data. Unless litigation reveals he asked the front-end devs to make it happen, it's negligent rather than deliberate.
Is this one of those situations where it's conceptually a public record in that it's always been available via a filing cabinet at a public library, but when placed on the global internet, it causes problems?
Well that's one way to "Increase Transparency and Information Sharing". I can't get the portal to work any more, but supposedly it also shared PII for FSC cardholders (a.k.a. pretty much every law-abiding gun owner in California).
I thought about getting a CCW when I was in California. I would have had to donate upwards of $20K to the local sheriff based on what other CCW's I knew had to do otherwise the form just sits in a pile for years. I found it was cheaper to move to a state that does not require a CCW to carry concealed. The only reason I would apply for one here would be if I planned to drive across the state border while carrying.
In hindsight I am glad I took the path I did. Things are getting weird(er). Politics are really starting to impact citizens in ways I had not imagined would happen in my lifetime. Surely these events are eroding what little trust and confidence people have in their governments? I am seeing too many "Ooops did I leak that?" events and blaming cloud configuration errors. It's a broken record at this point and I am not buying it.
Oh no! Decisions have consequences! Only, in this case it's discrimination against a choice, not discrimination against an unalterable attribute by birth.
Where exactly is the "doxxing"? This data appears to have come from individuals who willingly filled out government forms in a state with a FOIA-style law (the PRA) that includes all government information not explicitly excluded.
This is consistent with how FOIA and CCW laws interact in most states. For example, here's NY's explanation of how SAFE and FOIL interact[1].
First of all, WIC and Section 8 are Federal programs/statues.
Their state counterparts are explicitly excluded. Why? Because there's no obvious public interest in them. This is in contrast to firearms, where I have a public interest in knowing whether my neighbor has the ability to shoot me the next time I make a complaint about him.
Is there a compelling public interest? What percentage of shootings in California in the past, I dunno, decade have involved someone with a CCW shooting a neighbor over a complaint being filed against them? Is it nonzero?
If the number of shootings where a CCW holder has shot a neighbor over a complaint is substantially smaller than the number of cases where a CCW holder has not shot a neighbor over a complaint, doesn't this just serve to make holding a CCW intimidating in a way that most CCW holders neither want nor need? Most directly relevant to your public interest argument, is the rate of people shooting neighbors over a complaint substantially higher among CCW-permit holders than non-CCW-permit holders?
I think I would love concrete numbers as much as you would. Until then, "California neighbor dispute shot" gives me about 6.3 million results on Google. When I add "concealed carry" as a mandatory term, it reduces to about 1.7 million.
It seems like the California Attorney General's office would have numbers on exactly that, though, as it records the identities of both shooters and people who hold CCW permits.
Is the claim you're making that 1.7 million CCW permit holders have shot another neighbor over a dispute?
The first result I got from your search query was this
> Neal fired eight rounds into a Ford F-250 occupied by a mother and her son who were headed to school. The boy suffered non-life-threatening wounds, but the mother was seriously injured, Johnston said. The mother, who had a concealed carry permit, pulled out her own handgun but was unable to fire it before Neal drove away, Johnston said.
No, that would be ridiculous. My point, a very weak one, was that shootings between neighbors are not unheard of. It stands to reason (at least to me) that knowing about my neighbor's gun is likely to incentivize me to de-escalate the situation.
Sure. He can also bash me over the head with a big rock, or spray me with bear hormones and dump me in the woods. Like everything else in our society, we balance potentials with exigency, immediacy, and scale. A gun trumps a knife in all of these regards.
The gun owner is the fearful person. Not owning a gun in this country requires bravery considering our neighbors may be armed to the teeth. This comment takes no side in the issue of the leak. Just stating the fact that many purchase guns out of fear for their own safety.
These are all examples. You can do some cursory background on me and determine that I don't live in California, and that my neighbors are extremely unlikely to own guns.
See above. The law makes reasonable exemptions, particularly when the information is either universally obtained (nearly everybody has a state ID) or is a consequence of privation and not in the public interest (welfare programs).
CCW permits are neither of these: you opt into them, and they reflect no amount of privation while being entirely in the public interest.
Not any right, this specific one. Your right to own a gun is not coextensive with your right to privacy (a right, I may remind you, that has been significantly weakened by SCOTUS this week.)
See above for the public interest: people engage and escalate disputes all the time, believing that the other party is unwilling or at least incapable of conveniently murdering them. CCWs change that calculus; it's in my best interest as a member of the public to know whether my neighbor might murder me rather than merely being angry at a dispute.
People deliberately run people over with cars all the time. It is in my best interest to have a list of every car owned by my neighbor along with his DOB, how many times he failed the driving test, when he got his license and whatever other information related to vehicles and licences.
People engage and escalate disputes all the time, believing that the other party is unwilling or at least incapable of conveniently murdering them. Cars change that calculus; it's in my best interest as a member of the public to know whether my neighbor might murder me rather than merely being angry at a dispute.
Carrying a gun in public is “bearing it”, so you are completely wrong according to at least three Supreme Court decisions and easily readable text of the constitution.
If you are pretending you want constitutional open carry, we’ll, that’s pretty funny I suppose. Because you definitely don’t.
This is an extremely tortured reading of "bearing." SCOTUS has never determined that "bearing" means that any disposition of a firearm is acceptable; they have repeatedly determined that the Second Amendment does not extend a universal right to brandish (or not brandish) a firearm in any way you please.
Scalia is extremely explicit about this in District of Columbia v. Heller[1]:
> Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues.
>SCOTUS has never determined that "bearing" means that any disposition of a firearm is acceptable; they have repeatedly determined that the Second Amendment does not extend a universal right to brandish (or not brandish) a firearm in any way you please.
Carrying is not brandishing. Hot take there!
Did you really just try and cherry pick Heller vs DC to pretend carry is not protected? Read the words you posted...
prohibitions have been upheld.
And the hilarious next sentence Scialia uses that restores the context to tried to omit:
The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast
doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of fire-arms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of
arms.
Yes, a state can prohibit for felons, mentally ill, etc. If you stopped reading the rest of the opinion, and didn't go on to read McDonald v Chicago 2010, this still implies that a state will allow concealed carry for law abiding citizens.
The two options are:
1. You are hard-line and wrong, where all the states with concealed carry now including CA, HI, NJ, MD that will issue permits are respecting civil rights.
2. Everyone has it wrong but you!, in which case, this is surely frustrating.
Either way... Concealed carry exists and shall-issue is now the minimum law of the land. More states going to constitutional carry every year.
Turns out your desire convince people using frantic posts and omissions doesn't actually change anything. Crazy huh?
EDIT: Here is a cool gif that shows states over time. It'll now need to be updated to remove all the may-issue states.
I think it would behoove you to read this entire thread again. I'm not particularly interested in defending some kind of absolute prohibition against firearms from a constitutional perspective, because I know of no such argument.
Here are two points I've made, both of which I think are defensible:
* SCOTUS has repeatedly recognized that the Second Amendment does not reflect an absolute right to either own or employ guns however individuals would like. In particular, SCOTUS has recognized that both the states and the Federal Government have rightfully and reasonably regulated concealed firearms, and that there is no constitutional threat to such regulation as long as it does not constitute prohibition. The Federal precedent for such regulation goes back to 1897 and is not meaningfully adapted by either McDonald 2010 or Bruen 2022 (which both preserve "shall issue," like you've mentioned).
* There is a reasonable public interest in knowing who receives a CCW permit, one that is not impeded by the current "shall issue" standard. That public interest complements the current privacy standards under most states' FOIA/FOIL-style laws. You can see above and adjacent comment threads for why I think this is.
I don't see anything on this page that indicates the headline. A quick search on Twitter doesn't yield any results either. Are there redacted screenshots as proof? Anyone covering the leak?
Not many active duty officers have CCWs these days because of LEOSA, though reserve officers don't always qualify and will get a CCW instead. Plenty of politicians, celebrities, judges, and CEOs, though.
Doesn't this already happen with voter registration? I've managed to reconnect with old family that way. They just dump their name, address, and party affiliation on the internet.
Absent further information, it's not clear that anything novel was revealed: it's likely this was already public information, and that the AG has merely lowered the bar to (automatically) accessing it.
I thought that folks like judges were typically exempt from having things like their addresses released via FOIA. The CCW rejection reasons also include potential medical information.
They appear to have posted people's information who are lawful gun owners. That isn't bad citizens unless you think gun ownership means you are a bad citizen?
It's also doxxing (via DL # only, not home addresses fortunately) anyone who went through the less arduous process of obtaining an FSC (basically a license to purchase/inherit/be gifted a firearm). On top of that, people who possess registered assault weapons.
Jokes aside, this is inexcusable. There is no safety claim here, just revenge and fear for anyone that would dare to apply.
According to the site before it went down, SF had 11 permits issued. Next year it will be in the hundreds. The AG will try to deny as many as possible, but it’s over, may issue is dead.
Society considers it useful to have a sex offenders registry, like where they live, etc. I think gun owners are also a potential threat, ie. there is similar compelling public interest, and thus I don't see why it should be treated differently. For example if a scum of a "law abiding gun owner" like Rittenhouse is living next door you definitely would like to know if it has a gun.
How far does this go? Wouldn't it make just as much sense (or more) to post the PII (name, DOB, full address) of all people who have been convicted of a crime posted in a publicly searchable database? If you want to catch folks like Rittenhouse in that net, you could extend that database to every person who has ever been arrested or tried for a crime.
This is clearly vindictive, just as much as the sex offender registry is 90%+ vindictive.
Sex offenders are convicted criminals. You're saying convicted criminals of the most heinous crimes are equivalent to your neighbors who invoke a right that's existed in common law for centuries. I understand this is a highly contentious subject, but you're being divisive and ridiculous.
Let's be real: registry is punishment. Some of those people were convicted of urinating in public. If anything continued ostracization precludes reform.
What about victims of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, etc. who have purchased a firearm and/or applied for CCW as a means to defend themselves? Will you explain to me the societal value in the government releasing their address in context with other PII to the general public?
Consider an absurd second order effect where, if it's true that you're less likely to be robbed by being on this register, it encourages more people to buy guns, even if it means they don't have to use them.