Iconic gun-makers gave sensitive customer information to political operatives

https://www.propublica.org/article/gunmakers-owners-sensitive-personal-information-glock-remington-nssf

by rbanffy • 2 years ago

86 92 2 years ago

Is there any other civil rights fight going on now that's more vicious than the fight over firearms rights? Maybe abortion rights, although I don't know of Planned Parenthood doing anything like this.

falcolas11• 2 years ago

State attorney generals are suing hospitals in other states to obtain information on both transgender and pregnant folk's visits, with the intent to use that information to prosecute those people in the AG's state.

I'm not sure if that counts by your measure, but it involves the government directly.

Dah00n• 2 years ago

Sounds like a quote straight out of The Handmaids Tale! Reminds me of how Stasi operated. It also reminds me of the Signs Of Fascism list, actually.

rsynnott2• 2 years ago

That's kind of baffling; like, I'd have to assume that _very_ few people, even people who were generally opposed to abortion, would be okay with _that_.

I live in a country (Ireland) which only recently generally legalised abortion; before that people would normally have gone to the UK. If there had been any suggestion of the government prosecuting people who did that, never mind trying to force UK hospitals to divulge records, well... people wouldn't have put up with that. The situation as it was only continued so long because it was easy to ignore; ~no-one was ever actually prosecuted under the law, and the UK was enough of a safety valve that the human cost of the law was largely masked.

Like, doing things like this seems like a very good way to stoke national outrage and be forced to legalise it.

AlexandrB4• 2 years ago

Prosecute transgender people for what? AFAIK there are no laws against being transgender in any state.

nfriedly• 2 years ago

The reason the headline doesn't say which iconic gun-makers is apparently because it was a whole bunch of them:

At least 10 gun industry businesses, including Glock, Smith & Wesson, Remington, Marlin and Mossberg, handed over names, addresses and other private data to the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.

tiahura• 2 years ago

[flagged]

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

It's an actual requirement to give your personal information to gun stores when buying a gun so they can do a background check. They are prohibited by law from using that info for purposes like marketing, but they still have to collect and store it, and I'm sure all of them don't have great privacy policies. Even morons in the 1990s understood that.

wl• 2 years ago

This isn't about the data gathered on Form 4473s for the purposes of running background checks. This is about people filling out the warranty cards that came with the guns.

zer8k2• 2 years ago

4473s are a different, far worse, form of privacy invasion. Ostensibly used for background checks, kept forever in order for the ATF to do fishing expeditions.

_blk• 2 years ago

“The hypocrisy of warning about a governmental registry and at the same time establishing a private registry for political purposes is stunning,”

So does he suggest that databases on advertisement/customer preferences, voters, ... be run by the govt?

All debatable but I'll argue the constitution never gave the govt the right to know who owns guns since the ratification of the 2nd amendment, the purpose of which is exactly to defend against unconstitutional govt acts. So per se, that means if it's legal to be tracked, it has to be done in private registries.

_ea1k• 2 years ago

While I don't like manufacturers doing this, the comparison to government gun registries is indeed strange.

The manufacturers didn't compel buyers to provide this information with the thread of prison time, and perhaps more importantly, they didn't compel buyers to inform the manufacturer of every subsequent transfer.

michaelt• 2 years ago

Are there reasons to oppose a government database of guns that don't also apply to a private sector database of guns?

For example, if a future government decided to round up all the guns and needed a database to find them, the fact the database is in a different building ain't going to stop them.

MBCook4• 2 years ago

I don’t think that’s their point.

Their point is that all the hand wringing over privacy they use as the reason to prevent any kind of registration (whatever you think of it) seems very incongruous with giving away warranty information, which often they explicitly said they wouldn’t do, to whatever political cause they want.

It looks extremely hypocritical and in many cases violated a promise to the customers.

Yes the consequence of the government having a list instead of a lobbying group is very different.

The issue is the lobbying group shouldn’t have had it period.

gsk22• 2 years ago

To add to this, all it takes is one piece of legislation or one court order for the private registry to end up in the government's hands.

Gun owners who fear a government-run registry should fear a privately-run one just as much, if not more.

gigaflop2• 2 years ago

I've heard a lot over the years about how registries are a step towards confiscation. A bit conspiratorial, but also not totally unfounded.

Now that the government knows that this database exists, it seems like a partially-complete registry could be a lawsuit (and years of appeals) away.

The participants of this may have accidentally built their own Torment Nexus.

MBCook4• 2 years ago

To be fair, it’s just warranty data. It’s always existed. All you have to do is buy something to know it comes with a warranty card. So they could’ve figured it out it was there.

However the fact that they can now get it without having to sue for warranty information is certainly a new twist.

Of course they’d have to get it from a lobbying group, which wouldn’t exactly go over terribly well either.

int_19h• 2 years ago

The difference between the two is that a government-mandated registration scheme that mandates up-to-date status can clear a lot of legal bars that a private list compiled from random sources does not. Just because someone filled a warranty card for a gun 10 years ago doesn't mean that they still own that - or, indeed, any - gun today, and courts would generally balk at making such an inference for the purposes of, say, signing a warrant for a search.

goodluckchuck• 2 years ago

What’s wrong with this? If I shop at Joe’s Grocery, then it’s no secret that I’m allowed to tell my county commissioner about the fact that Joe sold me a banana.

Are they saying that Joe can’t tell the county commission that I bought a banana?

This is all just stuff we learn. It’s basic freedom of speech.

Sure, if I paid Joe $2 to keep it secret because my wife thinks I’m allergic… that’s different.

kyleblarson• 2 years ago

It is unlikely that the government is going to send armed men to take away your bananas.

sophacles2• 2 years ago

Why? They send armed men to take away my cats and my flowers. Whats to stop fruit from being next?

grahamj2• 2 years ago

Well you do have a point that armed men are a problem.

BobaFloutist• 2 years ago

Are they saying that Joe can’t tell the county commission that I bought a banana?

Yes, that's what gun-owners have been saying for decades about gun sellers.

brodouevencode• 2 years ago

The reason gun owners do not like government registries is because they may be used for targeting those owners for compulsory buy-back or confiscation programs. While the deceit of the manufacturers is indeed abhorrent, owners are not afraid of manufacturers showing up at their door.

It is two different things, and both are bad (but one is way worse).

WaxProlix2• 2 years ago

But the manufacturers re-shared that information with the government, isn't that the point of the article?

ang_cire2• 2 years ago

No, they shared it with the NSSF, which is a private lobbying group. Not arguing it was ok, just pointing out it was not shared with the government.

mrguyorama• 2 years ago

Except companies like Palintir show that there's nothing to stop law enforcement from buying exactly those same lists.

rootusrootus4• 2 years ago

That's just conspiracy theory. The government has no appetite for such a thing, not even a tiny bit. The best we could hope for is an extremely well funded voluntary buy-back program. Offer a thousand bucks each no questions asked (and no silly loopholes like turning in empty rocker launcher tubes, and exclusions for newly created weapons) and we could take a huge number of guns off the streets. Would cost a fair amount of money, sure, but at the scale of the federal government as a non-recurring cost it is entirely feasible. Economically, I mean, not politically.

lotsoweiners• 2 years ago

Wow $1000! That sounds like an easy way for me to turn one gun into multiple guns.

AlexandrB4• 2 years ago

It's weird how this article is ostensibly about the violation of gun-owners' privacy, but can't help but wander into the 2nd amendment discussion with sentences like:

Last month at a high school in Georgia, a 14-year-old used an assault rifle to kill two students and two teachers and wound seven more people.

The assault rifle in question is an "AR-15 style rifle". I.e. not an assault rifle.

Semi-automatic-only rifles like the Colt AR-15 are not assault rifles; they do not have select-fire capabilities.[1]

In conclusion, I don't know who this article is for. Gun owners and pro 2nd amendment readers will probably be put off by technical errors like this and the thinly veiled contempt for gun ownership. Many non-gun owners and anti-2nd amendment readers will probably think: "good, fuck em".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle

kevin_thibedeau• 2 years ago

Depending on the state, scary features like a carry handle or a bayonet mount upgrade a semi-auto to banned status. Bayonet on a bolt action? No problem.

matthewdgreen• 2 years ago

The article is reporting on a privacy violation. If the fact that it also expresses opinions you dislike makes you want to disregard those facts -- then you're making bad decisions and you should do better.

Personally I think it's valuable to have this information out there. Both for the folks whose privacy was violated, and for people who are concerned about how closely the gun industry works to coordinate its customer database with lobbying groups. (PS I own a gun and don't like anything about this news, from either of those perspectives.)

generalizations• 2 years ago

you're making bad decisions and you should do better.

This part was unnecessary btw.

Modified30192• 2 years ago

then you're making bad decisions and you should do better.

Please be mindful that this sort of talking down to people poisons conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

rootusrootus4• 2 years ago

Gun owners and pro 2nd amendment readers

I'm a gun owner and I can overlook them using a term in a way that it is popularly used among laypeople, even if it is technically not correct [0]. Discarding the content of the article on that premise would just be abdicating my responsibility to think.

[0] I gotta say, though, who exactly gets to insist on the definition of a general term like assault rifle? Seems like another instance of useless gatekeeping. A distraction.

jjulius3• 2 years ago

Can you really blame people for all of the confusion around whether or not an "AR-something" is 'technically' an "assault rifle"? I mean, if you go to the Wiki article that you cited, the piece you quoted links to the Wiki article about the Colt AR-15, which says:

The term "AR-15" is a Colt registered trademark which it uses only to refer to its line of semi-automatic rifles.

So, yeah, sure, it's not technically an automatic rifle, but if the manufacturer is going to call it a semi-automatic, I'm not going to fault the average joe for not getting it perfect. "Semi" is halfway there, or at least "is that thing to a degree", after all.

To be entirely honest, the whole semantics debate around "BuT iT'S nOt AuToMaTiC" misses the forest for the trees and shouldn't be given much space. As another person said, a distraction.

whaleofatw2022• 2 years ago

AR meant Armalite, the original designing company IIRC. Is the AR-19 an assault rifle too?

wakawaka283• 2 years ago

To be entirely honest, the whole semantics debate around "BuT iT'S nOt AuToMaTiC" misses the forest for the trees and shouldn't be given much space. As another person said, a distraction.

It's not a distraction. The government is always trying to reduce functionality of available firearms as well as increase costs. There is a huge difference between fully automatic weapons and semiauto. Nearly all guns on the civilian market are semiautomatic, aside from some antique designs, and full auto weapons manufactured prior to the NFA. I don't agree with the NFA's infringements on our 2A rights but I think a fair number of gun enthusiasts might agree with restricting full auto somehow. Semiauto is a big step down from that, and going away from semiauto is a HUGE step down from there.

The AR-15 has been vilified to an unfair extent. There is no particular feature about it that makes it more dangerous than other semiautomatic rifles that shoot ammunition in the same ballpark as far as caliber and velocity. Moreover, the whole point of having a weapon like that is for it to efficiently and accurately hit whatever you need it to hit. The only real way to protect your rights is to be adequately armed. The Founders knew that. The right solution to be secure is not to ban guns, it is to get more guns in more hands. Without a gun you will always be victim to someone who is bigger than you, groups of thugs, and any criminal who doesn't let the state dictate his choice of weapons.

Iconic gun-makers gave sensitive customer information to political operatives

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