On crying “uncle” and an unconstitutional law in New York

The Journal News, only willing to subject itself to so much pain, took down their gun owner database.

A suburban New York newspaper that outraged gun owners by posting the names and addresses of residents with handgun permits removed the information from its website Friday.

The Journal News took down the data just three days after the state enacted a gun control law that included privacy provisions for permit holders.

The provisions were a reaction to interactive maps the newspaper published on LoHud.com that pinpointed thousands of permit holders in Westchester and Rockland counties.

They gave some cockamamie excuse about the spirit of New York’s new gun law but the reality is likely that they realized the screwed up pretty badly.

Speaking of New York’s new gun law, it might be unconstitutional. Heller declared that handgun bans are unconstitutional. New York’s seven round magazine limit has rendered nearly every handgun that is not a revolver illegal. That is a de facto banishment of the hand guns, thus, unconstitutional.

Even though the New York law is not an outright ban of 9mm and .40-caliber handguns, it does make most of them inoperable, and thus would seem to fly in the face of the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Heller v. District of Columbia, in which the Court noted that “handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.” Even more to the point, the Court also held that restrictions short of complete bans could also fail constitutional muster. Thus it ruled invalid the District’s requirement “that firearms in the home be rendered and kept inoperable at all times,” noting that doing so “makes it impossible for citizens to use them for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional.” (The holding in Heller was applied to the states in McDonald v. City of Chicago.)

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