Tennessee Firearms Assoc. Inc.

After getting an e-mail alert from TFALAC I got on the phone to the Tennessean and spoke to a young lady named Jessica.

The first thing I detected in her voice is that she has been beaten up pretty good so far this morning about the paper's decision to publish the names of all carry permit holders.

I told her I was going to keep a calm civil tone and just discuss the situation. The sigh of relief was audible and she said that so far I would be the first of all the callers to do it in this manner.

She is clearly a low level buffer that fields incoming calls and never expected this much activity about their decision. That's good !!! On the other hand, she was somewhat uninformed as to why the paper chose to expose our names.

I suggested she do some homework on the subject after explaining to her some of the reasons why permit holders do not want and should not have this information made public. Eg: Now many people that can't get a handgun legally have a nice database of which homes that may contain guns and the pickings become more specific.

The last thing I was told is that she would have one of the editors get back to me and explain what would inspire their paper to publish something like this.

I told her that she has no idea how nice it must be to have the First Amendment rights so protected as the media does and yet we in the Second Amendment corner have and uphill battle all the way.

Now to see if I ever get that call.

Let's some of us take the high road on this one guys, it will make us look more credible. Of course, a bit of screamin' may not hurt too much either.

This data base can be found at:
http://data.tennessean.com/DB/dbc/ccwholder.php

Looks like the firestorm worked in this instance. The list is gone now.

I actually got a call, that I missed and it went to voice mail, from Ms. Downey, the editor of the paper, saying that the link was pulled.

I called back (to her voice mail) and thanked her for "doin' da right ting" and mentioned that probably a few thousand other legal permit holders thanked her also.

What type of stink has to be raised to make these records private?

Nothing precludes them from putting it back up; although they might have used this excuse to take it down and then just "forget" to republish it:

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll ... 7705090432

Wednesday, 05/09/07

Corrections

• A reference on Page 1A of Monday's Tennessean to a database posted on Tennessean.com should have said the database is of people who have state permits to carry handguns. The text wrongly said the database is of people who have concealed weapons permits.

• The Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition was misidentified in a May 2 story. The Tennessean regrets the errors.