SF Chronicle Requests CA CCW Data; Is Your Info in NV Safe?

The San Francisco Chronicle recently submitted public records requests to every sheriff in California requesting information on CCW permits. Sheriff Honea of Butte County was the only sheriff that publicized the request. The Chronicle editor criticized this, saying she had to up security.

Sheriff Honea only released the basic data, refusing to disclose things like addresses, but now the newspaper used to cover up bums on the feces covered streets of Frisco has every CCW holder's name. That includes my friends and relatives. The Chronicle editor stated that this will only be used internally to gauge trends. Pardon me if I don't believe that.

Across the country, newspapers have requested information regarding CCW permits. The most notorious abuse of this was the case of the Journal News in New York. It made an interactive map of permit holders in Westchester and Rockland Counties, down to the house. A lawyer then revealed the information about journalists who published public information. The Roanoke Times, in Virginia in 2007, published a list and deleted it the next day. 

A Tennessee newspaper also "doxed" gun owners. In Oregon, the Oregonian requested permit holder's names and cross-referenced it with the names of teachers to reveal which teachers were armed. Some teachers were harassed because of it.

Nevada's originally poorly drafted law only exempted information in the application, not the permit as issued or investigations into revocations. This came to a head when the Washoe County sheriff Mike Haley revoked Gov. Jim Gibbons' permit in 2008. It came to light that the governor's instructor Jerry Matsumura improperly endorsed the governor's application. Gibbons did not qualify with every firearm he certified on his permit.

Prior to 2011, one had to qualify with the weapons they wanted to carry. Your CCW card might say "handgun all" on the back; a remnant of the prior system. Gibbons' dilemma changed that and the confidentiality issue for us all. If it didn't happen to someone very powerful, we might not have gotten it at all.

The Reno Gazette-Journal, placed an open records request to find out the exact details of why the permit was revoked. The paper received a tip in 2008 that the governor had lost his permit. Their records request was rebuffed. The RGJ filed suit and the Supreme Court found in Reno Newspapers v. Haley that permit information, including suspension or revocation investigation data, was not exempt under the law. Under the original law, only the application data was confidential.

Now, the court ruled that confidential information, presumably "index information" like addresses and dates of birth that was particularly sensitive, could be redacted. It wasn't opening the floodgates wide. The editor of the RGJ said it was never paper's intent to reveal the identities or information of permit holders at large, merely just to investigate the Gibbons matter.

In this day and age, you can bet that the anti-gun, leftist infested newspapers of this state would do just that. And if not a newspaper, then perhaps one of the Bloomberg groups or the other heads of the hoplopathic hydra. Without Jim Gibbons screw-up, we might all be at risk. 

The short answer to that question is yes, your concealed firearm permit info in Nevada is confidential (except for law enforcement investigations. AB 143 of 2011 amended NRS 202.3662 to protect all of your information, except for law enforcement investigations.