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After a big hoopla was made from gun rights advocates over media outlets requesting publicly available information on gun owners, a Gawker FOIA request turned up evidence that the people who request public records on gun owners the most often are the gun rights advocates. We would suggest for very different, selfish reasons, too.

Sergio Hernandez made public records requests for all the parties who had made their own public records requests for gun ownership records across seven states. Many, it turned out, were either members of gun rights groups, like the National Rifle Association, or organizations working on their behalf. Public records requests for gun licenses has been politicized in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. Just last night, Robert Horne, the editor of a small town North Carolina newspaper, resigned after being flooded with hate mail after asking a local sheriff for publicly available records on gun owners. The issue caught on with gun rights advocates after The Journal News, a newspaper serving New York's Rockland and Westchester counties, was criticized for publishing a map of gun owners in their area. In response, gun owners published the newspapers' employees' personal info and addresses in a convenient map form. Gawker, itself, became a target on Fox News after it published a list of handgun owners in New York City. The National Rifle Association said the papers had "no business" going after the publicly available records.