For those that don't understand the implication of this: Criminals get guns through burgling and robbery. By included such detailed information on who's a registered gun owner, where they live, etc. It makes the gun owner a lucrative target.
I'm staunchly pro regulation but this even I can't understand. Like someone just did SELECT * FROM GunOwnersDB and pushed is straight to the web.
Most criminals get guns through straw purchases. This is still a big screw up, but overall, the best way to keep guns out of the hands of criminals is to better regulate sales.
> An expert on crime gun patterns, ATF agent Jay Wachtel says that most guns used in crimes are not stolen out of private gun owners' homes and cars. "Stolen guns account for only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes," Wachtel said. Because when they want guns they want them immediately the wait is usually too long for a weapon to be stolen and find its way to a criminal.
> In fact, there are a number of sources that allow guns to fall into the wrong hands, with gun thefts at the bottom of the list. Wachtel says one of the most common ways criminals get guns is through straw purchase sales.
This is highly misleading. Yes they purchased the guns, but where do you think those came from? Those black market guns include guns that were stolen by others.
> "Stolen guns account for only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes,"
Sounds like a BS statistic: what about all the crimes people got away with committing? How do they know the status of the guns used in those?
The real answer is probably that stolen guns are probably used by more sophisticated criminals (i.e., the ones that elude the police). And straw purchases are used by the people who keep getting caught, hence the need for the straw purchase to begin with.
That's how criminals get guns they actually intend to use. You're forgetting though that guns, like espresso machines and other machinery involving high pressures and tight tolerances, tend to be quite expensive, and their handheld nature makes them an extremely lucrative items to fence.
You guys seem to also have missed the trick of people reporting their gun was "stolen", when in fact they may have illegally bought a weapon for someone else. So, was it "stolen" or a straw purchase? Then there is also the trick of buying from private sellers (private seller exemption), where a background check is needed or not gets even more murky (depends on state). This makes such situations even more fuzzy. Just one big (purposeful?) continual mess, that's not going to be fixed anytime soon, if ever.
This seems like a reason to dislike all databases that hold this kind of information. These days, your personal info is at the mercy of your bank, your ISP, and a number of other entities who could leak data at any time just by being slightly complacent with security.
It's not like the old days where an attacker would have to haul tons of paper around and go through it manually.
Know a good Doxing lawyer? I know people who would happy be at the start of things rather than part of a class action that results in $0.33 and free credit monitoring for a year.
A study of crime scenes in Pittsburgh, PA, found that more than 30 percent of the guns that ended up at crime scenes had been stolen.x
Fabio A, Duell J, Creppage K, O’Donnell K, Laporte R. Gaps continue in firearm surveillance: Evidence from a large U.S. City Bureau of Police. Social Medicine. 2016; 10(1).
> An expert on crime gun patterns, ATF agent Jay Wachtel says that most guns used in crimes are not stolen out of private gun owners' homes and cars. "Stolen guns account for only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes," Wachtel said. Because when they want guns they want them immediately the wait is usually too long for a weapon to be stolen and find its way to a criminal.
Where do you think the black market guns come from? Pay attention to the footnotes. Also note that the data (which is used by the article too) is not about primary source. Meaning stolen guns could be included in the category of having been obtained from a friend too.
This took place in 2007. It was about midnight or 1AM and we were watching Clone High when there was a knock at the door. This being Canada and such I just opened the door, and the three guys pushed their way in with what I believe to be a Beretta 92 pointed at my face. Two of them guarded me while the other retrieved my then-girlfriend, now wife.
They proceeded to steal basically all of my father's firearms. They had significant difficulty in opening the safes and at one point brought me down to the basement (where my father's workshop was) to try to help them out.
They loaded everything into my mother's Dodge Neon. This process took them about two hours, during which time they rotated who was guarding us. Once they were finished, they bound us at ankles, wrists and hands with duct tape, flipped the main breaker, and drove off.
I gave them a count of approximately five minutes, and then worked to free us. When our hands were bound I moved my hands a bit apart to be able to get the tape off easier. I could then reach into my pocket for my knife (a Kershaw Leek) and cut the rest of the tape off both of us. I then called 911.
Over the next few weeks, I was the main suspect in the police investigation. I was interviewed repeatedly and polygraphed (the results of which were inconclusive, apparently). At one point one of the detectives basically asked my wife to "flip" on me, which she thought was pretty hilarious.
These guys are basically still at large, I guess you could say. Two of the guns have since been recovered but the rest have never been seen again.
Throughout this incident I remained quite calm. In fact, they played for me the recording of the 911 call, and suggested I must have orchestrated the incident because of how calm I sounded. Funny stuff.
I sounded too calm on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, I used "big words" ("affirmative", etc.) when giving my statement, and, and this one is my favorite, I didn't get super angry when they asked me what should happen to the bad guys. Yeah, like from that episode of The Office. I said something like "well, whatever the law says... do that" and apparently I should have said something more like "TEAR THEIR FUCKIN HEADS OFF AND SHIT DOWN THEIR NECKS AND THEN RIP THEIR DICKS OFF AND SHOVE THEM UP THEIR ASSES".
As far as I understand, PBS data is based on the guns, that were recovered and which it was possible to establish, that it was stolen, which depends on how this data is collected and reported by the states.
Doesn't it do the opposite though? It gives criminals a map of exactly who they shouldn't rob, lest they risk getting shot. I imagine criminals will go after the softest, easiest targets, not the hardened, well-armed ones.
>Criminals get guns through burgling and robbery.
Are you sure about that? I thought it was more via buying guns in states where they're easy to get and which don't keep registrations or records, then illegally, covertly transporting them across state lines, and then sometimes removing/filing serial numbers and other identifying info.
>Doesn't it do the opposite though? It gives criminals a map of exactly who they shouldn't rob, lest they risk getting shot. I imagine criminals will go after the softest, easiest targets, not the hardened, well-armed ones.
I'd say thieves generally want to rob when _nobody_ is home so it doesn't matter if they are armed or not. Knowing that there are guns stored in the house is just advertising something specific they might be able to steal.
In the city I reside in, trucks are targeted specifically because many truck owners have guns in the glove box. Just because you have a gun doesn’t mean you’re always around to use it.
> It gives criminals a map of exactly who they shouldn't rob, lest they risk getting shot.
This is the mythos the gun owners fashion for themselves, but in reality, they don't live in forts camped out behind sandbags. They only have two hands, work day jobs, own cookie-cutter houses in the suburbs, drink at night, have kids and bitter ex-spouses, follow predictable routines, and are as bad at security as everybody else.
There are plenty of opportunities to get the drop on a gun hoarder. Being brazen has its rewards.
I imagine organized criminals would say hmm, let's wait until they're gone away for the weekend, bet they're not taking all those assault rifles with them.
If I’m looking to steal guns and I know you’ve got them, then I’ll just wait outside your house for you to leave and then go in and get them. Or worse.
Depends on the criminal. Some are after goods they can quickly sell - others are after guns they can use to help commit more crimes. I imagine most criminals will not consult this document, but of those who do, some will be avoiding those houses and some will be directly going to those houses.
And yeah, you risk getting shot if you just barge into a house with a strapped owner, but all you need to do is ambush him when he's going to his car, or just enter his house when he isn't at home.
Firearms are nice targets for thieves because they are have a high profit-to-size ratio, are easy to fence, and are untraceable (unlike, say electronics that have built in tracking devices).
Leaks like this are one of the main reasons national registries get opposed. A few years back there was a paper in NY that published a Google map with similar data IIRC.
I believe that American crime literature indicates that the presence of guns offers general protective effects against home robberies for the entire region, and that the visible presence of alarms offers very specific protective effects for that home alone (while pushing the crime to other homes), and that the presence of invisible alarms confers a modicum of protection to the region.
I'm inclined to believe that this will push home robberies onto those without guns.
One thing I dislike about the news is that every article drops you into a situation, but you don't know how it ended up like that or what happened afterwards. It would be nice if some modern news site placed stories on a timeline.
Most burglaries happen when the occupant isn't home. Unsurprisingly burglars don't like people to be there when they break in. Guns don't operate themselves so it's not crazy to think that people who have them would have their homes targeted.
The AG said they were releasing the data for "increased transparency", so it seems like pretty clear retaliation for the recent CCW Supreme Court decision
"Criminals get guns through burgling and robbery."
True. But, not BY robbing people on the CCW list. That is a damn death wish. CCW is a privilege in CA. CCW permits are difficult to get, a large portion is issued to ex-police and judges. CCW holders practice at the gun range as it is required to pass and hold the CCW. EG. There isn't dust on their pistol.
God help you in court - if you are standing there charged with armed burglary of another judges / officers house [with CCW].
Apparently (based on Reddit posts) the DOJ used some kind of graph or map generation package to create the statistical summary that they put on the web. The package worked by accessing the raw data (complete with PII) and producing summaries and a map from it. It also inserted a helpful link to download the raw data. Oops. And that the raw data was reachable from the public-facing server at all was a double oops. And that the web dev department had access to the raw data rather than having it compartmentalized (presuming this happened) seems like a triple oops.
I don't know if the map was dynamically generated from the data on every page load (thus requiring the data to be there), but the slowness of the server suggests maybe it was. Another good reason to use static sites unless there is a good reason to do otherwise. This database only went through 2021, so it wasn't changing.
Last year Californian passed the bill that allows the release of the entire registry with PII to any research institution [1], that studies gun violence. So not only they leaked it themselves, but they also made sure that a grad or undergrad student at one of the universities can loose a flash drive with a info about all gun owners in California.
Robbing the home of a gun owner is a double edged sword. You know there’s a gun in there that you might want. You don’t know if it’s pointed at your head.
Doesn’t seem any different than accessing public records to see house sale transactions and then going and robbing people who spent a lot on their home?
I haven't viewed the whole thread, but one thing I haven't seen any discussion on is how dangerous this is for survivors of abuse. It's not uncommon for victims of domestic abuse, stalking, sexual assault, etc. to apply for CCW as a means of defense. Their address and other PII was made immediately available to the general public, _including their abuser_.
I've not submitted a PRI in the state of CA (which is what I believe is required for CCW data), but based on privacy laws I assume they're not handing out addresses on a whim.
Imagine you have a safe at your house to keep your important documents protected.
Now imagine that the government requires you to register your safe because a child could be trapped in your safe.
Now imagine that the database was leaked.
Your important documents were safer because you had a safe, now they are less safe because thieves know exactly what houses have home safes and thus where they should go to steal from.
My anonymous gun ownership make me and my neighbors safer because I:
1. Can protect myself and my family.
2. Gun seeking criminals (e.g. Mexican drug cartels) that are better armed for the occasion do not know to target my house for my rifles, shotgun and handgun.
3. Burgling my very (yet cool) progressive neighbors is risky since every other house in America has a gun (I found a corner of swing state America that looks down on lawn signs). Widespread gun ownership significantly lowers the EV of committing crime.
Sure but that's always been the case. People with guns at home shoot themselves, their spouses, or are shot with their own gun by burglars, at a rate obviously greater than that of people without guns at home. People with guns at home kill themselves at triple the rate of normal people.
I think you just fundamentally misunderstand human nature, the criminal mind, and the overall practicality of running a criminal enterprise even if you assume well-informed rational actors.
If you get burglarized, your ham radio equipment probably won't get stolen. And if it does, it's a crime of opportunity, not because someone found you in a database and somehow knew you had the good equipment.
But sometimes criminals are desperate for guns, or the quick cash that guns can bring. You don't want desperate, potentially violent criminals finding out that your house has exactly what they are desperate for.
If they want the cash, they could even prearrange a fence based on the database search. That's a little too convenient.
I mean, on one side they're saying that owning guns is necessary to protect their property. But now they're saying that owning guns makes them a target for crime? To me it seems like they're trying to have it both ways on this.
> Criminals get guns through burgling and robbery.
Private transactions are still legal. The gun show loophole is still around. Buying a gun and gifting it is legal.
Having a gun allows you to protect your life and property with force. Owning valuable property like guns can make you more of a target. It is ideal not to have the ownership of that property broadcasted. The vast majority of gun owners hope never to have to use their weapon except to put holes in paper from a distance.
The "gun show loophole" doesn't exist. It is still a crime for a prohibited person to possess a firearm no matter how they get it. In many states including California, it is illegal for a private sale to occur without a background check. Somehow, many prohibited persons still acquire them, and their info wasn't just leaked by the California AG.
> But now they're saying that owning guns makes them a target for crime?
They're saying that the government leaking their personal information makes them a target for crime. Is this comment a joke? I'm having trouble believing that anyone could seriously view this as somehow indicating that gun owners are hypocritical. I guarantee you that no gun owners wanted California to track and subsequently leak their personal details. If you're being serious, this is some of the (unintentionally) funniest sophistry I've seen in a while.
> Private transactions are still legal.
If you can't legally buy a gun at a store, you can't legally buy a gun privately.
It's 2022. Every web dev knows you don't just spit out PII on your website. But everybody involved kept their mouth shut because they thought to themselves "this is dumb, but I'm not responsible for it and if I try and champion the cause of fixing it I will be" and so they took it to prod. These sorts of "incentive to not rock the boat" or "it will take me months to get clarification on this requirement" type failures are rife in government bureaucracy.
Edit: Clearly I'm wrong and this is all malice from top to bottom /s Use your f-ing brains. You think someone is gonna risk their cushy government job to dox a bunch of gun owners and the managers are gonna risk their jobs signing off on it?
I think it is more likely the web devs didn't know or care what they were doing and they were just working on contract and they were told to put a button there so they put a button there. The middle management responsible for it probably fucked it up due to simple negligence and not carefully reading a stack of requirements and just not being at all engaged in the broader issues other than delivery. Someone who actual gave a shit probably got a few sentences into the requirements doc somewhere around access controls and PII concerns, but it was not called out clearly and just missed.
But yeah whatever really happened I'm quite certain that "the government of California just DELIBERATELY and with MALICE doxxed all the judges with carry permit" is the argument which needs to be met with "that's a hilariously large load of speculation".
I don't think GP had any way to actually know or think the code involved did a "SELECT *", he was just using that as a clever jokey way of saying "looks like they published all the details they had on gun owners?"
> You think someone is gonna risk their cushy government job to dox a bunch of gun owners
I doubt anybody will lose their jobs for this as long as there is even a modicum of plausible deniability (every unruly child knows the "it was an accident" excuse, but somehow adults seem to conveniently forget about it in cases like this.)
Good job, jackasses, now this will get trotted out as an example against anything that ties a name to a firearm (i. e., registration). And though I might fall in with the "if not Sandy Hook, then what is it going to take?" crowd, I can't say it's an invalid argument. I mean, a government is unlikely to be so bold as to just outright publish the PII. But what if we suffered a "data breach"? If it's the way I'd do it, is it really a conspiracy theory? :-)
No, this was no accident. California has been leveraging gun regulations as a foil to anti-abortion movements elsewhere in the country, including discussions of dissemination of lists of abortion recipients, providers, and facilitators for targeting by bounty hunters.
Now we have an accidentally-disseminated list of gun owners. "Oops," indeed. Turnabout is fair play?
Yep. This is an established pattern and practice by California.
Here's a famous one:
> Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, Inc., for the 2009 fiscal year was publicly posted; the document included the names and addresses of hundreds of donors.
It's no body else's business, especially the power hungry federal government, to know if I own a firearm. If you want to see what happens when you disarm citizens there are plenty of examples through history. You can look at Australia during covid and the camps they setup. The citizens could do nothing. The government should always be kept in check and having armed legal citizens is a wonderful thing for freedom.
How does private gun ownership check the government?
How would the government act differently if citizens owned fewer or different or no guns? Where does the fantasy that the everyone is out to get you and you had better be armed and ready come from? Cowboy movies? The whole idea of the cowboy is myth[0].
If you want to see real power hungry government in action, don’t think SWAT coming for you, look at the Missouri State Health director keeping a spreadsheet of women’s menstrual cycles, in order to make sure that if any became pregnant the state could intercede [1].
If you’re reading HN, you’re probably some kind of engineer. So tell me, how is a problem which is itself generated by the accumulation of brute power solved by a countervailing accumulation of brute power? Which then just becomes an arms race. Which is objectively insane. It is an infinite loop. How do you break it?
> You can look at Australia during covid and the camps they setup.
What camps? At some points, some international arrivals were quarantined in "camps" and, interstate or international travellers were variously required to isolate in hotels. The US had a range of at-home and government supervised quarantine too.
TO say they "set up camps" is disingenuous.
Having armed citizen is terrible for freedom. It means that the kind of person willing to use violent force against another person has power.
OK, that's two ways it could leak - data breach, and honoring an FOIA request. And that makes me think of a third way - improperly redacted evidence in a court case.
Paranoia about my data in government databases wasn't on my radar 15 minutes ago...
Hi. I'm from Appalachia and am a fan of the second amendment.
Please don't call me a jackass.
Now that we have that out of the way: Gun owners have brought this kind of thing on themselves. I've observed them for years.
Most of the demands for "privacy" for gun owners stem from the fact if you did a fair and accurate background check... they wouldn't be able to own them.
I don't own one, but they took me out on Pearl Harbor day when I was sixteen and showed me how to shoot a 1911 at the local range. Prior to that, I learned on BB guns, then at the archery range in Cub Scouts, then finally on bolt action .22s in the Boy Scouts. I can't hit a target accurately with a pistol more than 10 yards out, but I know enough if someone gives me one I can make use of it.
Anyways, the ugly truth is most gun owners in America... shouldn't. They're obsessed with movie plot threats and movie plot guns, when if you truly want to have a militia geared at ovethrowing fascist oppressors, you want to take a look at how they handled such things in places like occupied Prague or Amsterdam.
Hint: they didn't run up on the Nazis with deagles or AK-47 clones with drum clips so large they jam sooner than if you stuck with a 30 round banana clip -- they walked up with a .22 revolver so quiet you can't hear it from the next apartment over, emptied it into the skull of some local party official, dropping no casings, because it's a revolver, not a deagle with a dick extender, then dropped it in a canal or whatever and never spoke of it again, and slit the throats of those who felt otherwise as they slept.
The second amendment was about maintaining arms for hunting and/or a small guerilla force to hold off invaders until an organized militia could provide reinforcement, not so every tom dick and sally could replicate the National Guard armory.
This is made possible - ultimately - by the absence of criminal and statutory civil penalties for exposure of confidential data. Congress (gotta be federal) needs to jump on this for domestic and national security reasons, but the tech/data/corporate lobby will fight this to the bitter end.
> The Reload reviewed a copy of the Lost Angeles County database and found 244 judge permits listed in the database. The files included the home addresses, full names, and dates of birth for all of them.
How did this ever go live? Like, was it a bug or did they actually think putting this on the web was a good idea?
Bug. Incompetence. It looks like they put a giant spreadsheet with all the PII into Tableau and then embedded a web view to serve a geo visualization of some of the columns. Except they made the full underlying table accessible by anyone in Tableau.
I'm thinking that we should have a MTBL (Mean Time Between Leaking) companies and government. The data they have in their system will only be safe for X number of years, on average.
Also given how political the process of getting a CCW permit is in California (i.e. if you're not in a county with a sheriff willing to give a permit to everyone you either need to be rich or have connections) a disproportionate amount of cops, jail guards, celebrities, and wealthy businessmen (along with their home addresses) are going to be on that list.
Last year, SCOTUS ruled that California could not collect donor information from non profits. A large part of this was that California did a poor job of securing this information. They accidentally posted over 1700 Schedule B forms online for anyone to access over the last 10 years.
Gun registries only exist to support eventual confiscation via further erosion of 2A rights, such as red flag laws, assault weapons bans, and other restrictions on ownership.
So we can have separate state registries of: residents, voters, drivers, students, people on disability, people who are unemployed, among others, but gun owners would be too much?
How about this: the federal government already has sales info on FFL weapons via 4473, no?
So mandate that the last registered owner of a firearm is an accomplice to any crime committed with it, unless it was reported missing or stolen prior to the time of crime.
This would have the incentive effects of:
Parents keeping their nutso incel kids from their guns.
People would voluntarily get a notarized bill of sale for transfers, even private. They could not, but then they would be putting a high level of faith in the buyer and all future owners in perpetuity.
The notaries and bills of sale are now a de facto, decentralized but private source of record for transfers.
Unless there is something I don't understand about notaries.
Since you obviously don't own guns and therefore have nothing to lose, just replace "guns" with "cars" in your statement and maybe you'll understand why that's ridiculous.
Epic fail, it's pretty hard to discern if it's malice or incompetence that caused this. Either way, the jackasses responsible for this should have been mopping the floor in a grocery store by now, not explaining how this whole operation was to elevate trust.
Obviously I have no proof for this, but the timing would definitely suggest malice.
The Supreme Court just handed down an opinion that essentially struck down California's concealed carry law, not to mention Dobbs. This smacks of childish retaliation for not getting your way.
They only eliminated requiring a “good cause” to obtain a CCL. Self-defense was not considered a good cause in a number of cities and counties. Being a celebrity or donating was.
Bonte is leaning hard on the other requirement of “good moral character”, so there’s going to be more lawsuits.
I recall the Journal News, of New York, making an online map of locals who held gun permits, back around 2012. Of course, someone published the addresses of those journalists who were -- unsurprisingly -- all boo-hoo-hoo about it.
Readit News
I'm staunchly pro regulation but this even I can't understand. Like someone just did SELECT * FROM GunOwnersDB and pushed is straight to the web.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/g...
> An expert on crime gun patterns, ATF agent Jay Wachtel says that most guns used in crimes are not stolen out of private gun owners' homes and cars. "Stolen guns account for only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes," Wachtel said. Because when they want guns they want them immediately the wait is usually too long for a weapon to be stolen and find its way to a criminal.
> In fact, there are a number of sources that allow guns to fall into the wrong hands, with gun thefts at the bottom of the list. Wachtel says one of the most common ways criminals get guns is through straw purchase sales.
Please search the FBI and ATF online data for people arrested and or convicted of straw purchases.
Then tell me how serious they are about stopping it.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/suficspi16.pdf
Sounds like a BS statistic: what about all the crimes people got away with committing? How do they know the status of the guns used in those?
The real answer is probably that stolen guns are probably used by more sophisticated criminals (i.e., the ones that elude the police). And straw purchases are used by the people who keep getting caught, hence the need for the straw purchase to begin with.
Dead Comment
Also, this is why I dislike government databases.
It's not like the old days where an attacker would have to haul tons of paper around and go through it manually.
Fabio A, Duell J, Creppage K, O’Donnell K, Laporte R. Gaps continue in firearm surveillance: Evidence from a large U.S. City Bureau of Police. Social Medicine. 2016; 10(1).
Cool do you have any evidence or a citation to back up the claim. I’m surprised, seems more likely they would buy off the black market.
Edit: Instead of downvoting, provide the source.
Edit2: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/g...
> An expert on crime gun patterns, ATF agent Jay Wachtel says that most guns used in crimes are not stolen out of private gun owners' homes and cars. "Stolen guns account for only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes," Wachtel said. Because when they want guns they want them immediately the wait is usually too long for a weapon to be stolen and find its way to a criminal.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/suficspi16.pdf
300k-600k are stolen every year.
"That’s enough firearms to provide a weapon for every instance of gun violence in the country each year – several times over."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/21/gun-theft-us...
There are numerous city level reports as well if one cares to Google them.
This took place in 2007. It was about midnight or 1AM and we were watching Clone High when there was a knock at the door. This being Canada and such I just opened the door, and the three guys pushed their way in with what I believe to be a Beretta 92 pointed at my face. Two of them guarded me while the other retrieved my then-girlfriend, now wife.
They proceeded to steal basically all of my father's firearms. They had significant difficulty in opening the safes and at one point brought me down to the basement (where my father's workshop was) to try to help them out.
They loaded everything into my mother's Dodge Neon. This process took them about two hours, during which time they rotated who was guarding us. Once they were finished, they bound us at ankles, wrists and hands with duct tape, flipped the main breaker, and drove off.
I gave them a count of approximately five minutes, and then worked to free us. When our hands were bound I moved my hands a bit apart to be able to get the tape off easier. I could then reach into my pocket for my knife (a Kershaw Leek) and cut the rest of the tape off both of us. I then called 911.
Over the next few weeks, I was the main suspect in the police investigation. I was interviewed repeatedly and polygraphed (the results of which were inconclusive, apparently). At one point one of the detectives basically asked my wife to "flip" on me, which she thought was pretty hilarious.
These guys are basically still at large, I guess you could say. Two of the guns have since been recovered but the rest have never been seen again.
Throughout this incident I remained quite calm. In fact, they played for me the recording of the 911 call, and suggested I must have orchestrated the incident because of how calm I sounded. Funny stuff.
I sounded too calm on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, I used "big words" ("affirmative", etc.) when giving my statement, and, and this one is my favorite, I didn't get super angry when they asked me what should happen to the bad guys. Yeah, like from that episode of The Office. I said something like "well, whatever the law says... do that" and apparently I should have said something more like "TEAR THEIR FUCKIN HEADS OFF AND SHIT DOWN THEIR NECKS AND THEN RIP THEIR DICKS OFF AND SHOVE THEM UP THEIR ASSES".
3.6 roentgen per hour? That's actually significant...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal
Doesn't it do the opposite though? It gives criminals a map of exactly who they shouldn't rob, lest they risk getting shot. I imagine criminals will go after the softest, easiest targets, not the hardened, well-armed ones.
>Criminals get guns through burgling and robbery.
Are you sure about that? I thought it was more via buying guns in states where they're easy to get and which don't keep registrations or records, then illegally, covertly transporting them across state lines, and then sometimes removing/filing serial numbers and other identifying info.
I'd say thieves generally want to rob when _nobody_ is home so it doesn't matter if they are armed or not. Knowing that there are guns stored in the house is just advertising something specific they might be able to steal.
This is the mythos the gun owners fashion for themselves, but in reality, they don't live in forts camped out behind sandbags. They only have two hands, work day jobs, own cookie-cutter houses in the suburbs, drink at night, have kids and bitter ex-spouses, follow predictable routines, and are as bad at security as everybody else.
There are plenty of opportunities to get the drop on a gun hoarder. Being brazen has its rewards.
And yeah, you risk getting shot if you just barge into a house with a strapped owner, but all you need to do is ambush him when he's going to his car, or just enter his house when he isn't at home.
Deleted Comment
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/outrage-after-ny-newspaper-publ...
I'm inclined to believe that this will push home robberies onto those without guns.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/illinois-officials-spar-ove...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/illinois-house-approves-bil...
One thing I dislike about the news is that every article drops you into a situation, but you don't know how it ended up like that or what happened afterwards. It would be nice if some modern news site placed stories on a timeline.
I feel like this puts everyone without a gun at risk. I hope every gun owner in CA sue him up and down.
True. But, not BY robbing people on the CCW list. That is a damn death wish. CCW is a privilege in CA. CCW permits are difficult to get, a large portion is issued to ex-police and judges. CCW holders practice at the gun range as it is required to pass and hold the CCW. EG. There isn't dust on their pistol.
God help you in court - if you are standing there charged with armed burglary of another judges / officers house [with CCW].
I don't know if the map was dynamically generated from the data on every page load (thus requiring the data to be there), but the slowness of the server suggests maybe it was. Another good reason to use static sites unless there is a good reason to do otherwise. This database only went through 2021, so it wasn't changing.
This isn't good.
[1] https://thereload.com/new-california-bill-would-allow-the-re...
I've not submitted a PRI in the state of CA (which is what I believe is required for CCW data), but based on privacy laws I assume they're not handing out addresses on a whim.
Dead Comment
Now imagine that the government requires you to register your safe because a child could be trapped in your safe.
Now imagine that the database was leaked.
Your important documents were safer because you had a safe, now they are less safe because thieves know exactly what houses have home safes and thus where they should go to steal from.
My anonymous gun ownership make me and my neighbors safer because I:
1. Can protect myself and my family.
2. Gun seeking criminals (e.g. Mexican drug cartels) that are better armed for the occasion do not know to target my house for my rifles, shotgun and handgun.
3. Burgling my very (yet cool) progressive neighbors is risky since every other house in America has a gun (I found a corner of swing state America that looks down on lawn signs). Widespread gun ownership significantly lowers the EV of committing crime.
About half of households in the US have guns. Do half of cars have NRA stickers? A quarter? One in ten?
Gun owners are shy. Thats why we prefer concealed carry instead of open carry.
Not even close. Because most people aren't trying to advertise it.
Apples and oranges.
If you get burglarized, your ham radio equipment probably won't get stolen. And if it does, it's a crime of opportunity, not because someone found you in a database and somehow knew you had the good equipment.
But sometimes criminals are desperate for guns, or the quick cash that guns can bring. You don't want desperate, potentially violent criminals finding out that your house has exactly what they are desperate for.
If they want the cash, they could even prearrange a fence based on the database search. That's a little too convenient.
> It makes the gun owner a lucrative target.
I mean, on one side they're saying that owning guns is necessary to protect their property. But now they're saying that owning guns makes them a target for crime? To me it seems like they're trying to have it both ways on this.
> Criminals get guns through burgling and robbery.
Private transactions are still legal. The gun show loophole is still around. Buying a gun and gifting it is legal.
The "gun show loophole" doesn't exist. It is still a crime for a prohibited person to possess a firearm no matter how they get it. In many states including California, it is illegal for a private sale to occur without a background check. Somehow, many prohibited persons still acquire them, and their info wasn't just leaked by the California AG.
They're saying that the government leaking their personal information makes them a target for crime. Is this comment a joke? I'm having trouble believing that anyone could seriously view this as somehow indicating that gun owners are hypocritical. I guarantee you that no gun owners wanted California to track and subsequently leak their personal details. If you're being serious, this is some of the (unintentionally) funniest sophistry I've seen in a while.
> Private transactions are still legal.
If you can't legally buy a gun at a store, you can't legally buy a gun privately.
Edit: Clearly I'm wrong and this is all malice from top to bottom /s Use your f-ing brains. You think someone is gonna risk their cushy government job to dox a bunch of gun owners and the managers are gonna risk their jobs signing off on it?
But yeah whatever really happened I'm quite certain that "the government of California just DELIBERATELY and with MALICE doxxed all the judges with carry permit" is the argument which needs to be met with "that's a hilariously large load of speculation".
I doubt anybody will lose their jobs for this as long as there is even a modicum of plausible deniability (every unruly child knows the "it was an accident" excuse, but somehow adults seem to conveniently forget about it in cases like this.)
prediction comes true
Gun control advocate: "good job now they'll use this as an example"
Yep.
Now we have an accidentally-disseminated list of gun owners. "Oops," indeed. Turnabout is fair play?
Here's a famous one:
> Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, Inc., for the 2009 fiscal year was publicly posted; the document included the names and addresses of hundreds of donors.
https://reason.com/2021/03/04/californias-requirement-that-n...
The law they were using to sabotage groups they didn't like finally got ruled unconsitutional.
How would the government act differently if citizens owned fewer or different or no guns? Where does the fantasy that the everyone is out to get you and you had better be armed and ready come from? Cowboy movies? The whole idea of the cowboy is myth[0].
If you want to see real power hungry government in action, don’t think SWAT coming for you, look at the Missouri State Health director keeping a spreadsheet of women’s menstrual cycles, in order to make sure that if any became pregnant the state could intercede [1].
If you’re reading HN, you’re probably some kind of engineer. So tell me, how is a problem which is itself generated by the accumulation of brute power solved by a countervailing accumulation of brute power? Which then just becomes an arms race. Which is objectively insane. It is an infinite loop. How do you break it?
[0] See "This Land" pg 61-66 by Christopher Ketcham (https://lccn.loc.gov/2019018042), citing Lynn Jacobs "The Waste of The West" (https://lccn.loc.gov/92121736)
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/missouri-health-directo...
What camps? At some points, some international arrivals were quarantined in "camps" and, interstate or international travellers were variously required to isolate in hotels. The US had a range of at-home and government supervised quarantine too.
TO say they "set up camps" is disingenuous.
Having armed citizen is terrible for freedom. It means that the kind of person willing to use violent force against another person has power.
https://www.rcfp.org/journals/wake-journal-news-publishin/
Paranoia about my data in government databases wasn't on my radar 15 minutes ago...
We're way past that phase. New York has been playing this game for years[1]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2012/12/25/us/new-york-gun-permit-map/in...
This is literally what this thread is about.
As it should be, "I told you so" all day long.
Please don't call me a jackass.
Now that we have that out of the way: Gun owners have brought this kind of thing on themselves. I've observed them for years.
Most of the demands for "privacy" for gun owners stem from the fact if you did a fair and accurate background check... they wouldn't be able to own them.
I don't own one, but they took me out on Pearl Harbor day when I was sixteen and showed me how to shoot a 1911 at the local range. Prior to that, I learned on BB guns, then at the archery range in Cub Scouts, then finally on bolt action .22s in the Boy Scouts. I can't hit a target accurately with a pistol more than 10 yards out, but I know enough if someone gives me one I can make use of it.
Anyways, the ugly truth is most gun owners in America... shouldn't. They're obsessed with movie plot threats and movie plot guns, when if you truly want to have a militia geared at ovethrowing fascist oppressors, you want to take a look at how they handled such things in places like occupied Prague or Amsterdam.
Hint: they didn't run up on the Nazis with deagles or AK-47 clones with drum clips so large they jam sooner than if you stuck with a 30 round banana clip -- they walked up with a .22 revolver so quiet you can't hear it from the next apartment over, emptied it into the skull of some local party official, dropping no casings, because it's a revolver, not a deagle with a dick extender, then dropped it in a canal or whatever and never spoke of it again, and slit the throats of those who felt otherwise as they slept.
The second amendment was about maintaining arms for hunting and/or a small guerilla force to hold off invaders until an organized militia could provide reinforcement, not so every tom dick and sally could replicate the National Guard armory.
How did this ever go live? Like, was it a bug or did they actually think putting this on the web was a good idea?
I'm thinking that we should have a MTBL (Mean Time Between Leaking) companies and government. The data they have in their system will only be safe for X number of years, on average.
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/01/1004062322/the-supreme-court-...
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So mandate that the last registered owner of a firearm is an accomplice to any crime committed with it, unless it was reported missing or stolen prior to the time of crime.
This would have the incentive effects of:
Parents keeping their nutso incel kids from their guns.
People would voluntarily get a notarized bill of sale for transfers, even private. They could not, but then they would be putting a high level of faith in the buyer and all future owners in perpetuity.
The notaries and bills of sale are now a de facto, decentralized but private source of record for transfers.
Unless there is something I don't understand about notaries.
The Supreme Court just handed down an opinion that essentially struck down California's concealed carry law, not to mention Dobbs. This smacks of childish retaliation for not getting your way.
They only eliminated requiring a “good cause” to obtain a CCL. Self-defense was not considered a good cause in a number of cities and counties. Being a celebrity or donating was.
Bonte is leaning hard on the other requirement of “good moral character”, so there’s going to be more lawsuits.
I wonder just how "accidental" this leak was.