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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

So it would be ok to publish the welfare rolls, because applying for WIC or Section 8 is just filling out forms and there are FOIA laws?

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First of all, WIC and Section 8 are Federal programs/statues.

Their state counterparts are explicitly excluded. Why? Because there's no obvious public interest in them. This is in contrast to firearms, where I have a public interest in knowing whether my neighbor has the ability to shoot me the next time I make a complaint about him.

Welfare rolls tell you which neighbors are living off the fruits of your labor.

That would be your boss, not your local welfare recipient.

This comment rubs me the wrong way. He could stab you if you make a complaint about him too. Just saying. A gun doesn’t make you more violent.

Sure. He can also bash me over the head with a big rock, or spray me with bear hormones and dump me in the woods. Like everything else in our society, we balance potentials with exigency, immediacy, and scale. A gun trumps a knife in all of these regards.

You sound like a fearful person. Best you stay inside and make more calls to the police so they can take care of you.

The gun owner is the fearful person. Not owning a gun in this country requires bravery considering our neighbors may be armed to the teeth. This comment takes no side in the issue of the leak. Just stating the fact that many purchase guns out of fear for their own safety.

Do you own a fire extinguisher out of your fear of fire or a practical choice that you might need a tool to deal with a fire?

These are all examples. You can do some cursory background on me and determine that I don't live in California, and that my neighbors are extremely unlikely to own guns.

Is there a compelling public interest? What percentage of shootings in California in the past, I dunno, decade have involved someone with a CCW shooting a neighbor over a complaint being filed against them? Is it nonzero?

If the number of shootings where a CCW holder has shot a neighbor over a complaint is substantially smaller than the number of cases where a CCW holder has not shot a neighbor over a complaint, doesn't this just serve to make holding a CCW intimidating in a way that most CCW holders neither want nor need? Most directly relevant to your public interest argument, is the rate of people shooting neighbors over a complaint substantially higher among CCW-permit holders than non-CCW-permit holders?

I think I would love concrete numbers as much as you would. Until then, "California neighbor dispute shot" gives me about 6.3 million results on Google. When I add "concealed carry" as a mandatory term, it reduces to about 1.7 million.

It seems like the California Attorney General's office would have numbers on exactly that, though, as it records the identities of both shooters and people who hold CCW permits.

Is the claim you're making that 1.7 million CCW permit holders have shot another neighbor over a dispute?

The first result I got from your search query was this

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-tehama-county-shoo... (archive https://web.archive.org/web/20210718215711/https://www.latim...)

> Neal fired eight rounds into a Ford F-250 occupied by a mother and her son who were headed to school. The boy suffered non-life-threatening wounds, but the mother was seriously injured, Johnston said. The mother, who had a concealed carry permit, pulled out her own handgun but was unable to fire it before Neal drove away, Johnston said.

No, that would be ridiculous. My point, a very weak one, was that shootings between neighbors are not unheard of. It stands to reason (at least to me) that knowing about my neighbor's gun is likely to incentivize me to de-escalate the situation.

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