Federal firearms license holders, privacy, and Everytown’s assault on rights
Everytown for Gun Safety, the compaction of Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America into a merged anti-rights organization founded and in large measure funded by Michael Bloomberg, has released a webpage with downloadable documents providing the addresses of every federally licensed firearms dealers in the county. This includes not only big box chains and local gun shops, but also licensees who operate their businesses out of their homes.
The source of all of those data cited on Everytown’s webpage is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the ATF, the federal government’s agency for the regulation not only of some of our private amusements, but also of a constitutionally protected right. Everytown chose to leave Curio and Relic Collectors licensees out of their data dump on the argument that we “are not engaged in sales,” so my readers will not be able to find my address through this means, but that does not appear to be the result of any charity on Everytown’s part. The ATF provides the same data on their own page, which also leaves out Type 03 license holders, thus denying Everytown one group of names, thereby creating for them a small measure of virtue out of a necessity.
This publication is reminiscent of that of The Journal News, a paper catering to counties in the vicinity of New York City along the Hudson River that, drawing on public records, released the names and addresses of handgun ownership licensees in 2012 following the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. As with that case, the data were already publicly available to anyone with the time—or the interns or other employees with nothing better to do—to acquire and organize at will.
Which is to say, this is a case of something being legal, but wrong.
That requires some analysis. Businesses that operate from buildings open to the public in commercial zones perhaps will have no objection to a bit of publicity—though there is at least one problem even here—since their names and addresses are likely to be in telephone directories, if such things still exist, and on websites of their own. Everytown’s page may not be the first place a prospective gun buyer goes, and whoever set up that page needs some practice, since the map keeps resetting to California for reasons unknown, but I have seen a few dealers in my area that I had not heard of before, and it would please me to buy guns that Everytown let me know are for sale. How accurate the map or the data upon which it is based, I do not know, yet a little driving around in search of new sellers could be entertaining.
While these data were already available from the ATF’s website, they were the kind of thing that someone would have to know to look for. A troublemaker who just hates guns, but has not taken the time to learn the byways and rabbit trails of the subject perhaps would not have realized that dealers have to be licensed or that their locations constitute discoverable information. Everytown has now handed them all that is needed to feed their GPS devices—I would like to believe that no one with the skill to use a paper map supports gun control, but that may be excessive optimism on my part.
Dealers who operate from their homes are likely to be the sort of business owners who like to serve a select list of customers without drawing a lot of unnecessary attention. This will sound nefarious to gun control advocates, but a licensed dealer would have to follow the same rules as a big box store or face penalties. What Everytown has done is to make disruptive protests in formerly quiet neighborhoods more probable. Walmart has already bowed to the pressure of protesters, deciding no longer to sell ammunition for handguns or rifles chambered in .223/5.56 such as the original model of the AR-15, for example, but corporations like Bass Pro Shops may not be so timid, and local gun shops make a good deal of their limited profit from the sale of ammunition and are also motivated to keep guns on the shelves that advocates of disarmament find icky. The neighborhood home owners association, by contrast, might not be all that forgiving if a bunch of irate moms were to block driveways and frighten little dogs.
The bigger concern is that Everytown has just compiled a database and interactive map for criminals who would like to visit the homes of small-time gun dealers. A store on Main Street may have more funds available for security systems, but said business is also in a public space with other businesses surrounding and regular police patrols. A dealer’s house might have an inquisitive neighbor with a pair of binoculars, but relative obscurity was a layer of protection that Everytown has stripped from the hobbyist seller.
The objective here strikes me as that of trying to drive more and more gun dealers out of business. Someone who has an FFL for the purpose of making a few trades a month with known persons may see Everytown’s action as creating too much hassle and decide to look for other ways to pass the time. This would leave the market more and more in the possession of the big box stores, since the profit margins for local shops is always thin. The end result would be fewer places to buy old guns, odd guns, guns made in small batches, and the ammunition to feed all of the above.
And that is an easier market to control. The Constitution and the current Supreme Court have closed many avenues to restrictions through the law, leaving gun control advocates to have to find more devious means of preventing us from exercising our rights. Mapping out the means of harassing gun dealers is exactly the kind of end run around legal protections that the courts and legislatures could little remedy.
So perhaps I will use Everytown’s map as a shopping guide. I knew about many of the ones listed in my area already, but if the ones formerly unknown to me are in fact in business, they may very well be happy to have me as a new customer.
Perhaps I will keep it to myself that Everytown sent me.