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Comment by bayerian | Hacker News Reader

What purpose would that map serve? The only thing I can think of is your easily-offended neighbors would avoid you and your house.

I can think of a few other potential side effects:

1) Problems for your kids. "No, you can't go and play at Timothy's house, his parents have a gun".

2) Making your house a target for people who want to steal your guns.

3) Potentially being discovered and held against you by employers.

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Making your house a target for people who want to steal your guns.

For some people it's a list of gun owner households... for some robbers however it might be a list of homes without guns :P

One could probably trivially combine the gun ownership data with publicly available property value data to pick targets for robbery.

You could further enhance it with proxies for use of security systems such as 911 calls (can one FOIA a list of all 911 calls?), but with the software industry as it is anyone going to all this trouble could probably make a better return by getting a job or just doing freelance dev work.

I thought that calls to 911 from security systems didn't happen directly. As I understand it, if a system is tripped, the security system's call center calls you, and in certain circumstances, would then call 911 on your behalf but not necessarily from your house.

Thats typically correct. My thought was that if you knew what numbers security monitoring companies would call from, you could filter out those calls, then extract the addresses they reported incidents at. Of course the monitoring company will filter out a lot of false alarms, so you'll get less data points to work from, so like I say... I'm not sure it would be worth it.

The reasoning here is that a stolen-but-legally-obtained-and-registered-by-someone-else gun is worth an awful lot on the black market. It's effectively untraceable once it's stolen, meaning that crimes committed with it are much harder to pin on the perpetrator.

#2 isn't a likely example simply because life doesn't work out that way. The people who steal a gun is usually from someone they know.

#3 is possible but, with what has happened so far, conservative bosses have threatened to decline their workforce if Obama won the election. Nothing has been shown to the opposite.

The people who steal a gun is usually from someone they know... has a gun.

The people who steal guns have never before had an easy menu from which to choose.

Many gun thefts are crimes of opportunity/passion like you say, but not all. Most violent offenders don't steal the guns they use to commit crimes they buy them from the black market. Promoting a black market opportunity is a very dumb policy.

An old (circa 1997) U.S. Department of Justice survey of prison inmates possessing a firearm during the offense that put them in jail showed that only 14% bought their gun from a retail store, pawn shop, flea market, or gun show. 40% acquired their firearms from family or friends. [0] The remainder were stolen or purchased on the black market. I can't say whether recent trends are any different, it's not my area of interest anymore.

The FBI compiles data on the theft of guns through the Stolen Gun File of the NCIC database [1]. I haven't had access in a long time but when I was doing research many years ago I found that between 1992 and 2002, around 1.7 million firearms were taken, representing a rate of 16.8 stolen firearms for every one thousand households. Of those stolen weapons, 687,857 were later recovered by authorities or by "guns for x" amnesty turn-in programs as of 2002. So that means more than one million of those stolen firearms were unaccounted for as of 2002.

[0]: Caroline Wolf Harlow, Firearm Use by Offenders, Bureau of Justice Statistics, November 2001 (sorry no link available that I know of)

[1]: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ncic/ncic_files

What about Scott Eckern, the Sacramento theatre director who made a donation in support of California's Proposition 8?

I'd be wary of suggesting people of only one political viewpoint behave badly, since we don't know what issue will be the lightning rod in the future. Recording and sharing less information protects all of us.

What if the data in question regarding #3 was not a database of weapon permits but say a database of marijuana licenses or tax stamps which seems an almost inevitable conclusion of current political trends? Ok with your employer knowing about your legal possession and use of a now legal substance?

On the flip side as a startup founder making important key first hiring decisions would you want to know about a candidates legal drug use?

> 3) Potentially being discovered and held against you by employers.

Interesting, I just realized that political viewpoints is not necessarily a protected class [1]. Presumably owning a gun is sort of a political view. Can an employer technically discriminate against such people? It feels like a class action law suit waiting to happen so I am guessing there is a law out there that gets violated.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class

You can fire someone for owning a gun in most states. Gun owners aren't a protected class except for Missouri where a law was recently passed to make them one, despite no known cases of someone firing an employee for gun ownership. Interestingly, LGBT individuals aren't a protected class in Missouri, despite many cases of firing employees for being an LGBT individual.

The libertarian in me feels that gun ownership or the lack thereof shouldn't be any business of my employer. I am however more offended that what a person does in their bedroom is not protected by Federal Law.

I can imagine making political viewpoint a protected class could have immediate negative ramifications on politicians, making it unlikely that political viewpoint will ever become a protected class.

Unless maybe corporations set up to run campaigns could somehow be excluded from this perhaps?

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