Shootout at the Constitutional Corral

Just as all politics is local, so is all journalism.  Following the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre last month, enterprising reporters across the nation wrote all kinds of local stories.  What are our local gun laws?  What is our local school policy on safety? What do our local community leaders think about it all?

My favorite was the White Plains, NY Journal News, which published an interactive Google map with the names and addresses of the 44,000 registered handgun owners in the two large New York City suburbs they serve, Westchester and Rockland counties.

In New York State, gun ownership is public information.  It helps police to track ownership when a gun is used in a crime.  Like all kinds of business we conduct with a government agency, it’s public.  Especially since Watergate, Americans like the Freedom of Information Act.

But in neighboring Connecticut, where the massacre took place, and in many other states, a newspaper could not have published such a list.  That state actually has a very strong gun control law, but it only passed with a concession to gun owners that their records not be public information.  (In some states you don’t even have to register your guns.)

It is crazy to have such a patchwork of gun laws from community to community and state to state.  It’s like how crazy-making it is that our voting laws and policies vary so much from state to state (are there written or electronic ballots, can a felon vote, how long before the election must you register, etc; there is no consistency.)  This is a huge US challenge – when are we a united nation, and when are we a union of different almost sovereign states?

Gun owners in those two NY counties objected loudly to the published list.  Where usually they trumpet their constitutional second amendment right to bear arms, now they charged a violation of their constitutional right to privacy.  Besides this broad right, they argued that some gun owners (police officers, women with restraining orders against violent husbands) especially need anonymity.

Americans love their right to privacy.  I think it stems from the same attitude as our love of guns.  Leave me alone, let me do anything I want, and if you don’t I will shoot you.

Problem is, the word privacy never appears in the Constitution.  A right to privacy has only evolved from various court rulings around birth control, sexual behavior and abortion.  Hard fought cases, and capable of being overturned at any time by our conservative Supreme Court.  And so confusing, to me at least.  How can conservatives argue “Keep government out of our private lives!” But then say, “Oh no, you have no right to privacy when it comes to sex.”  Americans are pretty conflicted and confused about sex and guns.  We can tell people who they can sleep with, but not who they can shoot.

But the White Plains newspaper said that public safety outweighed the privacy rights of these gun owners.  There are public lists of registered sex offenders so that parents can see if their child is going to play at a home in a neighborhood where such an offender lives.  Why not have such information about whether Johnny’s playmate’s home has guns in it?

(This same public safety argument was used by pediatricians to defend their practice of asking parents of young children if there are guns in the house, just as they ask about use of seat belts and child proof medicine caps.  Florida gun owners objected to that kind of public health medical practice and passed a law forbidding doctors from asking that question.  I think that one is in the courts now.)

Back in White Plains, an angry gun owner retaliated by publishing on his website a piece called “Sauce for the Goose” with the home addresses and phone numbers of the staff of the offending newspaper.  He added in snide comments like, “Here’s the Facebook page of the publisher, with pictures of her kids.  Hello Sanctimonious.”

The newspaper got so many threatening calls and letters that they hired armed guards, yes, armed, at its offices.  This reminded me of the National Rifle Association’s response to the massacre.  They want to arm every teacher; that would have saved all those little kids, they said.

The threat of guns is like mushrooms; it just spawns more threat of guns, and more guns of threat.

(There was another mass shooting the week after Sandy Hook, in Illinois this time, in a church, where they were putting up Christmas decorations.  I guess the NRA would say that not just teachers, but preachers, start packing heat.)

But we’re not done with White Plains.  Fox News reported (consider the source) that convicts in a local prison were intimidating the gun owning guards; “We know where you live.”  I’m encouraged to hear that the convicts read the paper.

So now, among all the proposed new gun legislation in all these different communities, are new laws that would make it illegal to publish gun owner’s information.  Forget public safety; keep the door locked on my privacy.

But I think the door is stuck open, probably gone forever.  With Facebook and Google there’s no such thing as privacy any more.  Unless we try to shoot them too.

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter