angiEmedia

The White Plains Journal News is a New York newspaper owned by Gannett which recently engaged in irresponsible journalism that could endanger the safety of the public. The newspaper staff has published the names and addresses of thousands of local handgun owners on its website in what appears to be an attempt to harass or intimidate gun owners.

While they try to claim they are somehow advancing the debate on gun control, fingering those who are licensed to legally own handguns who have not committed any crimes doesn’t do that. Instead, it creates a new treasure trove of information to be abused by criminals to harm innocent people.

Thanks to the White Plains Journal News, criminals who have access to a computer will now be able to improve their aim at targeting households for the crimes of their choice. They can go visit the web page, pick the county they want to target, and then go find the homes with handgun licenses.

Having a list of home addresses associated with licensed gun owners can be very valuable information for criminals in two ways. For criminals who want to steal handguns, now they know much more precisely what homes have them. For criminals who want to steal, rape, kill, or otherwise terrorize with less risk of accountability at the hands of a victim who has the means to defend himself or herself, now they have information that can aid them at selecting safer targets who are more likely to be unarmed and defenseless.

However, it is important to note that owners of rifles and other guns that are not handguns are not published on this list. So any enterprising computer literate criminal who decides an unlicensed house would make an easy target could end up facing down a homeowner with a shotgun, rifle, or semi-automatic “assault” rifle.

After this irresponsible newspaper stunt, anybody who doesn’t already own a handgun in Westchester or Rockland counties should consider buying a firearm because that second category of easier targets is not a group of which you should be happy to be a part. And for those in Putnam County — the Journal News is trying to obtain a list of handgun permits there with plans to publish that list, too. Putnam County, however, is attempting to refuse to provide its gun registration list containing over 11,000 handgun permit holders.

Journal News is not the only group publicizing gun permit holders. Despite the outrage over that incident, Gawker then published a 446 page long list of New York City gun permit holders. At least one person has claimed this has triggered renewed harassment against her by a former stalker.

Gun Control Laws Do Not Take Guns Out of Criminals’ Hands

The Australian experience with gun control in the past decade has shown that gun bans are good for criminals because these laws increase the number of unarmed or poorly armed targets who can be victimized with little risk. This makes crime a safer occupation.
Read more…

Selectman Willie Farnum

Tamworth, New Hampshire, resident Scott Finman was upset with a local law banning citizens from carrying guns on town property. In the “Live Free or Die” state, it was an offensive law. Rather than just being upset, he took action. He blogged against the firearm restrictions that violated New Hampshire state law. He even drew cartoons and posted them on the Live Free and Comply website to poke fun at the illegal law at the tyrannical behaviors of the town government. The town’s volunteer firefighters and other residents joined him in his criticisms.

This was too much for town tyrants John Roberts, Willie Farnum, and Cassandra Pearce to tolerate. Recently, the Tamworth Selectmen (the local government council) decided to get even with Finman. They reassessed his home for $4 million and issued him a $70,000 tax bill, reasoning that since he didn’t let an assessor enter the home to inspect it that they could apply whatever valuation they wanted. This is at least the second time this year they have reassessed a property to punish a critical local resident. They did this earlier to former Selectman Tom Abugelis for writing a letter-to-the-editor criticizing the attitudes and actions of the town government.
Read more…

We’ve written many articles on our site about government abuse of children and families, particularly when the targets are fathers during child custody battles. You might think that government employees would be exempt from this kind of abuse. This is far from the case. In our article Father Imprisoned 20 Years on Fake Child Sex Abuse Charges, we talked about the case of falsely accused former police officer Clyde Ray Spencer who was set up by his ex-wife and her police sergeant lover to go to prison for child sex abuse crimes which apparently never occurred.

In this article, we discuss the case of Jeremy Swanson, a target of governmental abuse who was an employee of a Canadian war history museum. As an award-winning museum curator well known in community for his work for the Canadian Museum of Civilization War Museum in Ottawa, Jeremy Swanson unsurprisingly also had a personal interest in historic antique firearms. His small collection of antique firearms and non-functioning replicas was legal, licensed, and securely stored with trigger locks in a safe with ammunition stored separately. He took a trip back to his homeland of South Africa, during which time his ex-wife, Susan Swanson (formerly Susan Scott), initiated a divorce and made false allegations against Jeremy Swanson involving his mental health and gun collection.
Read more…

Mainstream media and political pundits are winding up their broken record players to interrogate Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor with the inevitable and unending question: “What are your views on abortion?”

It’s time to get off this broken-down bandwagon. Her views on rights of due process, parental rights, 2nd amendment gun rights, freedom of speech, illegal government law enforcement tactics, and many other civil rights issues are far more pressing than her views on abortions. Yet abortion questions seem to be the the majority of the discussion on her qualifications for a seat on the US Supreme Court.
Read more…

Gun control laws are likely to be a topic of further discord under the Obama Administration. The US Constitution Second Amendment states:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Over the years, some of the federal cases involving 2nd amendment law found that there was no individual right to bear arms but that instead the right belongs to the States. Other decisions found the right to bear arms is an individual right accorded to the people of the United States, not merely to the States.

Read more…