Montana AG Tim Fox shoots down gun-shaming* attempts.

This should not be surprising.

Montana’s Attorney General Tim Fox has taken a stand against revealing the identities of concealed weapon permit holders.

[snip]

Montana’s AG Fox, a Republican, said he had received numerous requests recently, mainly from media, for the names and addresses of those legally authorized to carry concealed weapons in that vast Western state. The requests sought all available information on the permit holder, including date of birth, employer, Social Security and state driver’s license number.

In a legal memo, Fox came down on the side of denying all those requests, ruling “that the privacy of permit holders exceeds the public’s right to know.”

Basically, AG Fox noted that the media likes to take this information and turn it into projects that try to gun-shame people who own firearms.  It doesn’t really work, of course; but then ‘working’ may not be the primary goal for advocates of the practice.  ‘Lashing out’ is probably more accurate.  Kudos to Fox for telling the Media to go take a hike…

Moe Lane

*Yeah, that description was picked with malice aforethought.  Hopefully, I’ll either get some incredibly huffy responses, or some extremely tortured attempts to flip it back on me.  Either will be good for a laugh.

5 thoughts on “Montana AG Tim Fox shoots down gun-shaming* attempts.”

  1. Perhaps Republicans should threaten not to reauthorize the Freedom of Information Act whenever it next comes up for a vote. We all know how much they’ve abused that privilege.

  2. SSNs? What possible valid use could they have for those? Everyone who requested them should be facing charges of attempted identity theft.

    1. Dang — you beat me to it! Also, there might also be a federal statute that prohibits this … and if it turns out that there’s coordination among any of the people seeking this information, you might be able to indict them on a RICO charge too.

  3. Being the evil sort that I am, I have an idea.
    .
    Any reporter who requests that information will have the following happen: His name, phone number, ssn as well as all the information of everyone who works at their paper or news station gets released at the same time.
    .
    If anything happens to anyone on the gun owner list, everyone on the repoter’s side of the house are now considered “Outside the protection of the law” and are legal to hunt. This suggestion would insure that only the most rabidly dedicated of anti-gun zealots even try this.

Comments are closed.