Hobbs Opposes Newspapers’ Right to Post His Junk Mail List

I’ve now stayed up as late as I can to see what the reaction of the local gun-nut community would be to Bill Hobbs’s latest piece of nonsense, but my connect is strangely silent on the matter.

Here’s the deal.  We have a kind of fuckerly paper here in town and they pretty regularly post information that, though it is their right to post it, seems to serve no other purpose than to try to humiliate and scare the people whose information it is.

See, the way I see it, if there’s an issue… say our friend W., who works for the state, is found to live in a $4 million dollar mansion, and stand on the lawn of his palatial estate yelling, “Just you wait, Fred Thompson, I will kill you dead.”  A reporter might wonder “Gosh, does W. have the means to carry out such a threat?  Let me look up in these public records and see if he has a concealed weapon permit.  And, hey, how’s a government employee with a teacher wife and some new babies afford a four million dollar house?  Is he taking kick-backs?  I’d better look up his salary, which is also a matter of public record.”

I am fine with those records being open and available for anyone who has a specific concern.

But the newspaper just posting lists of who’s got a gun or who makes what who works for the state?

I don’t like it.  It seems torrid to me and to serve no purpose than to make it easier for people to be nosy when they don’t need to be.

And, considering that the gun-nuts find the local paper to be hostile to them, it’s easy to understand why they might be a little put-out that the newspaper is publishing their names and addresses.

So, in response to that, some Republican legislators tried to pass some legislation that would make it a misdemeanor to publish such information.  Due to Democratic shenanigans and because such legislation is most likely unconstitutional, it failed to pass. (See Uncle, Serr8d, and Demarcationville for reactions.)

But then, in a moment so hilarious it could only be brought to you by Bill Hobbs and the geniuses over at the Tennessee GOP, Hobbs fires off a moving news release blasting the failure of the bill to pass—

Yesterday in Nashville Naifeh and his anti-gun gang ran roughshod over commonly-accepted parliamentary procedures in order to kill legislation that would have made carry permit holders more secure by protecting their personal identity information, and also killed legislation that would have allowed carry permit holders to carry their gun into restaurants for their personal defense.

–while almost simultaneously, once it was clear the bill wouldn’t pass, requesting access to the personal identity information of said permit holders:

But on the same morning that the Tennessee Republican Party had advocated for the records to be sealed, the GOP’s spokesman, Bill Hobbs, filed a request for the list with the Department of Safety, confirmed its spokesman Mike Browning.

Contacted for reaction, Hobbs said the Tennessee GOP is “aware of the irony in our requesting a copy of public records that we thought should not be public.”

But what’s a little hypocricy among friends?