Capital
A New York appellate court has sided with the New York City Police Department in a dispute over whether it should turn over home addresses of handgun owners to The New York Times, which made a Freedom of Information Law request for them in 2010. Dana Rubinstein describes the court’s thinking: Releasing the addresses “might endanger permit-holders, and, since the NYPD had already released the zip codes of permit-holders to the Times, would really serve no further journalistic purpose.”
New York state approved a gun law last month that put a lid on public records about gun owners.
The Times had no plans to publish a Journal News-style map of gun owners in New York City, a Times source told Rubinstein in January:
The Times rarely, if ever, publishes raw data, and it had no intention of publishing the addresses of the permit holders, someone at the newspaper told me, when I called to ask about the suit.
Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy told Rubinstein the paper is “considering our legal next steps.”
Previously: NYT reporters sued for gun owners’ addresses | Journal News fronts gun info about Congress members | Buffalo News requests gun data — to have, not to publish | Poynter’s Journal News gun map archive
