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Legislature Restricts Access to Gun Permit Data

New York State’s new gun law seeks to restrict ownership of certain weapons. But it also restricts something else: access to previously public information about gun permits.

The new law, passed on Tuesday, requires that, for the next 120 days, no information about gun permit holders in a new statewide gun registration database is made  available publicly, according to Robert Freeman, the executive director of the State Committee on Open Government. After that, gun permit holders will have the right to have their names and addresses removed from the database by contacting their local county clerks or police departments.

Legislators rushed to include this protection in its gun regulation proposal after the suburban newspaper The Journal News published on Dec. 23 the names and addresses of gun permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties, and put online a map showing the locations of the gun permit holders.

The article and map prompted outrage from gun owners, who said they felt they could be harassed or have their homes broken into. Employees of The Journal News received so many threatening phone calls and e-mails that the publisher hired armed guards to protect the staff. A local gun group organized its members to contact advertisers, pressuring them to pull advertising from the paper.

Janet Hasson, The Journal News’s president and publisher, said in a statement about the new law: “We are disappointed with the broad nature of several exemptions in the law and lack of opportunity for any reasonable period for public comment or discussion. We are reviewing the law and the impact it might have on publication of permit data in the future.”

Mr. Freeman added that the newspaper could still publish the data. The Journal News obtained the information legally through Freedom of Information Act requests, and it is already in the public domain.

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Undeterred by calls for gun restrictions after the Newtown school killings, gun owners and dealers at an arms fair in upstate New York proclaimed their right to bear arms.

“It’s up online,” Mr. Freeman said. “The information is in cyberspace.”

New data from the state will be available, but will not include information from gun owners who request to be excluded. New York joins other states that have made gun information less accessible in recent years. Fewer than a dozen states continue to make some data about permit holders available, according to Laura Cutilletta, senior staff attorney with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which was started in San Francisco after a 1993 workplace shooting. Many of those remaining states have caveats, like Arkansas, which limits the data to the name and ZIP code of an applicant when they are requested by an Arkansas resident, Ms. Cutilletta added.

Many journalists had predicted shortly after The Journal News published its data that legislators would call for an end to public disclosure of the information in New York. Matt Waite, a professor at the College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Nebraska, noted that Florida, which he described as the “Shangri-La of public records,” shut down access to gun data shortly after an Orlando television station published a database of people with concealed-weapons licenses in 2005. A similar response occurred in Virginia, after The Roanoke Times published data in 2007.

Professor Waite lamented the many types of journalism that reporters would be unable to practice when information of this kind is no longer available publicly. “We no longer know if people who are qualified or mentally ill or felons are getting firearms’ licenses,” he said. “We have no way of independently verifying whether the government is doing their job.”

The Journal News article and map spurred disagreement even among journalists, many of whom argued that the reporter, Dwight R. Worley, could have chosen a more effective way to publish the data without singling out individuals. But Mr. Worley said he was committed to publishing it.

“There is no additional need for analysis and pairing with other databases,” said Mr. Worley, adding that simply informing people about who owns guns in the community was enough.

The swift shutdown of access to gun data has led to a discussion among journalists about how to approach the publication of contentious data in the future. Mark Horvit, the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit organization, stressed how important it could be to publish such information with context, especially something as controversial as gun data.

“Any time that a news organization does something with data that causes controversy, it creates the risk that lawmakers will seize the opportunity to make information that should be public private,” Mr. Horvit said. “This is a cycle that gets repeated.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Legislature Restricts Access to Permit Data. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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