San Francisco newspaper threatened after asking for gun permits in conservative counties

The San Francisco Chronicle’s request to Sutter County’s sheriff may have appeared routine to a journalist used to requesting government documents.

But asking for information about the 3,700 concealed weapons permit holders in the conservative rural county quickly set off a cascade of threats and vitriol — after the sheriff announced on Facebook he was legally obligated to provide the names.

Now, the Chronicle has been forced to increase security at its newsroom and for its reporters. Gun owners across the country are livid, fearing a newspaper in one of America’s most liberal cities wants to “dox” the state’s gun owners by releasing a list of names of people with a concealed-carry weapons permit, or CCW.

“It’s a newspaper, so they are likely trying to tabulate numbers for an article about ccw. I understand the concern though, I don’t trust those bay area commies,” read one of the 862 comments on the sheriff’s Jan. 28 Facebook post, which has been shared more than 2,000 times.

The Chronicle says it had no intention of publishing any such database, but will instead use the information in the aggregate to look for trends and ensure the concealed weapons system isn’t being abused. The blowback is the latest flare-up in tensions between defenders of the Second Amendment and the news institutions explicitly protected by the First Amendment.

Thousands of California Public Records Act requests are filed each year by journalists, companies and private citizens, and most of them go unnoticed. This one struck a nerve.

Gun owners believe knowledge of firearm ownership should be private, partly because of they hold Second Amendment rights sacred and partly out of fears public knowledge of their weapons could lead to theft or violence if someone knows they are armed. Citing similar concerns, some states have moved to make gun permit records confidential.

Meanwhile, other states, including California, treat concealed weapons permit information like they do most other government records and require them to be released under open-records laws.

The Chronicle is the latest in a string of newspapers to have experienced threats and other harassment when gun owners learned their records had been released or had been published.

‘Our Second Amendment’

The paper’s top editor, Audrey Cooper, declined to say specifically the threats the newspaper received and what security steps management took in response. But she was adamant that the newspaper had no intention of publishing gun owners’ names en masse, saying doing so would be against her paper’s ethics policy.

Instead, Cooper said the aggregate information is for a reporting project that looks for broader trends. In September, the paper reported that the Santa Clara sheriff was under investigation after granting one of the few concealed weapons permits issued in that Bay Area county to a security company executive who gave $45,000 to the sheriff’s 2018 re-election campaign.

Cooper said she plans to have her staff file requests for concealed weapons permit records in all 58 California counties.

“I think in this case it was politically expedient for them to come out looking like they were defenders of the Second Amendment at the expense the media — and in this case — the personal security of people in the newsroom,” she said.

“Any time your family is threatened because you’re trying to do a decent and ethical job, it is very alarming and a very sad state, “ Cooper said. “Some of (the people harassing the newsroom) are just gleeful that physical harm comes to journalists without knowing any of us on a personal level or listening to what we intend and how we do our jobs, which I think is a really sad state of American discourse.”

Sutter County Sheriff Brandon Barnes had an obligation to notify the county’s 3,700 CCW permit holders, many of whom were lining up at the sheriff’s office after word spread the Chronicle had requested their information, Undersheriff Scott Smallwood said Monday.

“People were wanting to know what’s going on,” Smallwood said.

The posting on Facebook, which included a letter Barnes’ office sent out to the county’s concealed weapons permit holders, was the fastest way to do that. “As always, I am committed to protecting the rights of our citizens, and those rights afforded to us by our Second Amendment,” Barnes wrote in his letter.

Barnes’ letter did not note that when the county issues concealed weapons permits, the forms say a permit holders’ information could be released under the California Public Records Act.

The Butte County sheriff also notified his county’s gun owners in a letter that the newspaper had put in the request.

Public records vs privacy

Barnes’ Facebook post caught the attention of gun rights advocates and conservatives eager to paint members of the “liberal media” as gun haters out to release gun owners’ information.

The conservative news site, The Daily Caller, included an article about Barnes’ letter written by Larry Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun trade association. Keane’s piece included a sub-headline titled “Doxing Gun Owners – Again,” using the colloquial term for the intentional posting of someone’s personal information online so they’ll be harassed.

Al Tompkins, an expert on how journalists cover gun issues at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, said it’s wrong to assume those who say they are wary of the release gun owners’ info are doing so only to score political points. He said gun owners have legitimate privacy concerns, and there are plenty of good reasons why someone like a judge, a former police officer, or a woman with an abusive ex-husband would want a concealed weapons permit.

But at the same time, Tompkins said, those gun owners should know there’s a reason why their license information is a public record: Transparency helps ensure the system isn’t being abused.

“Sometimes, we have to ask nosy questions in order to know whether a system is working,” Tompkins said.

At the same time, journalists need to be careful about how the data is used, “and there’s a darn good reason, that you explain yourself and you stand accountable for it,” he said.

Should gun records be public?

In 2009, the Indianapolis Star newspaper used handgun permit records to show that the Indiana State Police agency had been giving permits to people with troubled and violent pasts, sometimes despite objections from local police.

Instead of reforming the system, however, that conservative state legislature voted to prohibit the release of the information after the Herald-Times created a gun permit database that didn’t include anyone’s names or addresses.

There was a similar legislative push in New York in 2013. After the nearby Sandy Hook school shooting, the Journal News in New York published an interactive map including names and addresses of 33,614 gun permit holders in a two-county area under the ominous title “The gun owner next door: What You Don’t Know About the Weapons in Your Neighborhood.“

Gun owners responded by digging up editors’ and writers’ personal information, including their home addresses and information about where their children attended school. Reporters received notes saying they would be shot on the way to their cars; and packages containing white powder were sent to the newsroom and to a reporter’s home, according to the New York Times.

The newspaper took the database down after the state legislature passed emergency regulations that included a moratorium on releasing the records. The legislation also gave gun owners the right to opt-out from having their information released. Meanwhile, lawmakers in at least 10 states responded by introducing bills that would restrict access to gun records in some form, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

California Assemblyman James Gallagher R-Yuba City, also posted on Facebook about the Chronicle’s request. He said he’s frustrated the paper “essentially tried to continue this narrative that (concealed weapons) holders are scary people that we should be afraid of.”

Gallagher said he’s considering introducing legislation that would prohibit the release of the gun permit information as part of a broader privacy bill.

“What other permits are we going to make public to everybody?” Gallagher said. “I support transparency. I support our newspapers’ right to be able to get public information. ... But I also support people’s right to privacy and their private data.”

Cooper, the Chronicle’s editor, said she understands why gun owners might be worried.

“You don’t get a concealed carry permit unless there’s fear for your security,” she said. “I completely empathize with that, which is why we would never publish private citizens’ names writ large just because we can.”

The experience taught valuable lessons about journalists needing to do a better job of explaining how the reporting process works to their readers, she said.

“I think one of the problems we have is that people view the media as a very monolithic thing,” Cooper said. “When in actuality nobody’s newsroom is like another newsroom, and we have all have different sets of standards and practices. I don’t want to be the spokesperson for all American media, because some of it, I have pretty big problems with — just like many Americans do.”