Media
Journal News owns first bad result
The first burglary to result after The Journal News published and mapped all the gun owners’ addresses in two New York counties has now happened. Worse yet: one of those named is a judge. A judge with her own television show.
Journal News at fault in burglary – senator
New York Newsday has the report on the burglary. At 9:30 p.m. Saturday January 12, two men broke into a home on Davis Avenue in White Plains. That home is on the map that The Journal News published last Christmas Eve, showing names and addresses of all gun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties. (A local TV station produced this segment pointing that out.) They tried to break into the special gun safe were the homeowner stored his guns. They couldn’t get into the safe. The homeowner was not at home. Naturally he won’t comment while the cops are looking into what happened at his house.
That much we know. But Senator Greg Ball (R-Brewster, NY) raised Cain over the weekend. He laid the blame squarely with The Journal News:
The Journal News has placed the lives of these folks at risk by creating a virtual shopping list for criminals and nut jobs. If the connection is proven, this is further proof that these maps are not only an invasion of privacy but that they present a clear and present danger to law-abiding, private citizens. Former convicts have already testified to the usefulness of the asinine Journal News “gun maps” yet the reckless editors are evidently willing to roll the dice, gambling with the lives of innocent local homeowners.
Readers of CNAV will remember that we said it first. Any homeowner in Westchester or Rockland County (or said homeowner’s estate) who suffered a burglary, or worse, a burglary-murder, would have standing to sue The Journal News for its article and map. This particular homeowner had guns, and the burglars were after them. But what about his neighbors who don’t have guns? Won’t burglars now know which homes they can safely “hit”?
Here Come da Judge!
The giant gavel at the Ohio Judicial Center in Columbus
CNAV also said we have no judge or lawyer on our staff. But Fox News Channel has at least two judges and two lawyers. And one of them – Judge Jeannine Pirro – is on the list that The Journal News published. Wikipedia has her biography: county court judge in Westchester County, and then Westchester County District Attorney for twelve years. (The Wikipedia bio is out-of-date. It does not reflect her current TV gig, Justice with Judge Jeannine, on Fox News Channel.)
Pirro sent two producers to question the editor-publishers of The Journal News. The two women refused to talk, and literally slammed the door in the producers’ faces. So the Judge simply ripped their skins off on her TV show last Saturday. RealClearPolitics has the full transcript of her remarks. She said The Journal News unfairly compared lawful gun owners like her to Adam Lanza and others like him. (Was she laying a foundation for a defamation action? Maybe.) But the most important thing she said is:
And, by the way, although it is none of your business, there is a reason people have guns.
And to compound the irony, Judge Jeannine did this while two men were breaking into her neighbor’s house.
Journal News running out of friends?
Eric Wemple, at The Washington Post, took due note of these events. He said before that what The Journal News did, might have given gun owners a “stay-away” sign and exposed their neighbors to more burglaries. But now he calls on The Journal News to “self-disclose criminal actions” at the houses on its map.
Did they? Their crime beat doesn’t even mention the burglary. Someone breaks into a house on their beat and they don’t even cover it. They might just as well have said,
Under the advice of our corporate general counsel, we respectfully decline to cover this story on the grounds that it may tend to incriminate us.
Well, they should have thought about that before they published and mapped Judge Jeannine’s address. Not to mention a certain man who owns a home on Davis Avenue in White Plains.
No wonder The Journal News is losing readers.
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Terry A. Hurlbut has been a student of politics, philosophy, and science for more than 35 years. He is a graduate of Yale College and has served as a physician-level laboratory administrator in a 250-bed community hospital. He also is a serious student of the Bible, is conversant in its two primary original languages, and has followed the creation-science movement closely since 1993.
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1) You claimed it was the houses without guns that would be targeted
2) Your argument is pure post hoc, ergo propter hoc anyway.
Actually, I said that burglars would target both kinds of house. Read my last article again. If the target was on the list, the thief-murderer would be after his gun(s). If not, the thief-murderer would know (or think he knew) the homeowner didn’t have a gun, and would hit the house knowing (or again, thinking he knew) he could pull the job and get out without a scratch.
When you publish an all-inclusive list like that, then any given house is either on it, or not. So a burglar, seeking either guns or other valuables, could plan accordingly.
Water flows uphill, dinosaurs walk with men, the Sun stops in the sky and I agree with Terry.
This piece of journalistic idiocy has greatly assisted burglars in the area whether they want to steal guns or not. Someone should go to jail for it.
Criminal prosecution would be impossible in this case. The law as it now reads would never allow it. Even Senator Ball’s proposed new laws would not let anyone prosecute the paper for this particular piece of plain foolishness, for our Constitution forbids ex post facto laws. But I still say the residents of Westchester and Rockland Counties have standing to sue the paper. I also say the paper has NO standing to sue the clerk and exec of Putnam County, who REFUSED to disclose anything to them.
Suing the paper seems reasonable, reluctant as I am to make Americans even more lawyer-happy than they already are. Some sort of class action to make the paper pay for the top of the line security systems that everyone in the area now has to install could be amusing.
So no matter who is burgled, it is now proof that you are correct.
What sort of event (or statistical lack of event) would theoretically falsify your claim?
A decline in burglaries overall.
Theresa Brooks liked this on Facebook.
If would-be burglars would target houses both on the list and ones off it… then what’s the difference?
Different kinds of burglars will target different houses, and will go in with different levels of preparation. When you find evidence that the perpetrator of any given burglary planned his heist with a level of preparation appropriate to the listing (or non-listing) of the target home by The Journal News, you know what use they made of that information.
Information of this kind is called intelligence take. That paper just gave valuable intelligence take to the “burglar sub-culture” of the two counties in question.
You have just admitted that owning a gun doesn’t make a difference to whether or not you get burgled. For once, you’re quite right.
I’m also somewhat shocked that you’re against a news agency publishing information that was already in the public domain. It seems CNAV doesn’t believe in the First Amendment.
That news agency has no more right to publish the names and addresses of gun permit holders than it has to publish and map the purchasers of any given brand of automobile.
I agree that it has no _more_ right, yes, since it has the right to publish both those lists, if it can come by the information in a legal fashion. In a similar vein, one can march up and down the street across from an elementary school openly carrying a loaded semiautomatic rifle as an expression of second amendment rights.
Not so. They have laid themselves open to at least one lawsuit, and possibly several. And now New York did one right thing among several wrong things: they just passed a law to make that map flatly illegal.
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