Posted on 01/05/2003 6:38:23 PM PST by Mortimer Snavely
Phil Van Cleave, head honcho of the Virginia Citizens Defense League, Inc., just e-mailed this:
"The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star is publishing a list of area residents who have concealed handgun permits.
Great idea Free Lance - let's tell all the criminals which houses to burgle in order to get some guns! Great service to the community.
Maybe the editor and senior people at the Free Lance should publish their personal home addresses so that they, too, can spend quality time with some of those cuddly little felons.
Here is the link:
If you find publishing CHP holder's names and addresses to be a pretty stupid idea and to be endangering of the citizens of Virginia, let them know about it. Just because they have the right to publish public information does not necessarily make it the smart or correct thing to do:
newsroom@fredericksburg.com "
I suppose it's also possible that it was merely forwarded to some federal agency and either sits in limbo or has suffered a similar fate as described above.
But I do think that your point is a good one, and is at least in part what the newspaper had in mind. One of the major gun prohibitionist arguments is that criminals steal guns from honest people, hence honest people shouldn't be allowed to have any. If they can help that argument out a little, so much the better, and anyone who thinks that they would never stoop that low doesn't know many anti-gun fanatics. Would they ever stoop to deliberately seeing that this list got into the hands of criminals, in the hopes that it would result in violence to a despised class? Yep, they just did exactly that.
I think it's quite possible.
And while the list might well scare away petty crooks and two bit types, hardcore criminals know that to steal guns you first have to go where the guns are.
Just like car thieves, if you want to steal high dollar cars, then you first have to deal with high dollar security systems. That's part of it and a "professional" criminal won't be deterred.
And now they have a list to aid them.
I hope there is a lawsuit that comes out of this. It's completely unnecessary and unjustified.
Unless the elephant guns being harbored in those unlisted homes are just too heavy to carry to make a CCW permit practical. ;)
ROTF
I didn't say anything about public policy. I just gave some reasons why people wouldn't want their names in the paper.
Then why I have I not received a single piece of junk mail relating to guns, outdoors, hunting, or the like for three years?
If they're selling the lists, my name must somehow be excluded.
Exactly...but we can deduce that they have not even pulled my print for comparison...yet. You can't compare fingerprints without reducing the image to what they call "minutia points." The places where the lines split and join and end. These are measured on a radial coordinate system that self-aligns when you compare them.
So they would've had to encode my image into the very small bit of data req'd to "have my minutia points on file."
But that's when the computer would balk at having a crummy image. So it's clear to me that they haven't encoded my print, or did try and just omitted my "minutia points" from the database.
Either way, they refused to tell me what they were going to do with the print (future use they said) and at least now I have some level of feedback/control over when/if they use it.
I didn't give them away to begin with, nor allow them to be stolen.
Stupid sheople don't need no Bill of Rights, do they?
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