The Journal News Fallout: Limiting the First Amendment to Protect the Second

Eight days after a gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School, shooting and killing 20 young students, 6 staff members and fueling a national discussion on gun control, The Journal News in Lower Hudson, New York, published an interactive map of all residents in its community who possessed a firearms permit. The data — initially including the names and addresses of permit holders — had been obtained through the state’s Freedom of Information Law and could have been accessed by anyone upon request. Still, the decision to publish the data in its aggregate appeared to many as an unacceptable and needless invasion of the privacy of gun owners, and sparked a fierce debate over the ethics of such disclosure.

The Journal News ultimately decided to remove much of the personal data from the map, and the ethical debate over whether that data should have been published in the first place has for the most part died down. What remains, however, is a concerning unintended consequence: At least several states are considering to pass or have already passed legislation hindering access to gun registries or banning the publication of the data altogether.

Pat McDonough, a state delegate in Maryland, is proposing the latter. “The bill is going to prohibit publications from printing private information of gun owners,” said McDonough, who as of last week had not released a copy of the bill. “This is really a response to the paper in New York which claimed what they were doing was for the public good, but what [the gun map] really is is a massive editorial taking up two pages of the newspaper reflecting their position of the newspaper.” 

When asked by a Baltimore City Paper reporter if he intended to “limit the First Amendment in order to protect the second,” McDonough responded: “That’s a good way to put it.”

Reaching for the Shade . . .

Many states already exempt gun registry information from their respective FOI laws, considering such disclosure to be an unwarranted invasion of privacy. See State Survey on Gun Permit Disclosure, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Open Government Guide. The Supreme Court of Michigan, for example, found that gun ownership is “an intimate or, for some persons, potentially embarrassing detail of one’s personal life.” Mager v. Dept.