New Jersey is a notoriously strong gun-control state (or anti-civil rights state, depending on which side of the argument you stand on). The newspaper is trying to further that position, and the state seems to be fighting it. What gives there?

I think ALL of us, pro-rights or pro-control, would prefer to have all the data at hand.

names. I'd like to see where criminals get their handguns.

then you will not see where the criminals get the guns.

nt

government secrecy should be limited to the smallest extent that is demonstrably necessary. On the other hand, I feel strongly about privacy for individual citizens, even for records that aren't specifically protected by law.

In this case, it seems that the records could be released with the individual names replaced by a unique code, and specific addresses truncated to town or zip code. That way the paper could do whatever aggregating and analysis it wanted, but the individuals' privacy would be maintained.

Although I suppose the paper wants to contact the last recorded owners and ask how the firearms left their possession - in that case maybe an order mandating the release of the info could require the paper to subsequently destroy and never reveal the identifying info. Or the identified owners could be allowed to 'opt-in' to being specifically revealed to the paper.

It's also possible that the police really are using some of the info to investigate illegal activity - straw sales, for example - in which case the data should be kept under wraps until the investigation is complete...

These are people who probably already had guns stolen from them. The last thing you want to do is publish a list of people it's easy to steal guns from.

I'm all for publishing the gun source data as long as it doesn't publish actual names or other identifying information.