re: #186 Killgore Trout

It’s hard to speculate about the motives for making the map. But I suspect this is the kind of thing that happens in newsrooms on holiday weekends when all the senior editors and reporters are on vacation. Some second stringer or inexperienced reporter was compiling the information and just happened to finish his project when nobody was around to tell him not to publish it.

This comment shed some light…

Anne McTernan Parker University at Albany, SUNY
I saw the article that prompted the certainly questionable decision to run this map, and it wasn’t about Newtown. It was about a mentally ill man who was able to amass a bunch of guns, who shot his neighbor in the head. Not disagreeing with the sentiments being expressed about the map itself, but the conspiracy theorists are off the mark on this one.
Reply 1 Unlike 5 hours ago

So I checked the related links and sure enough they lead to this article…

The gun owner next door: What you don’t know about the weapons in your neighborhood

In May, Richard V. Wilson approached a female neighbor on the street and shot her in the back of the head, a crime that stunned their quiet Katonah neighborhood.

What was equally shocking for some was the revelation that the mentally disturbed 77-year-old man had amassed a cache of weapons — including two unregistered handguns and a large amount of ammunition — without any neighbors knowing.

“I think that the access to guns in this country is ridiculous, that anybody can get one,” said a neighbor of Wilson’s who requested anonymity because it’s not known whether the gunman, whose unnamed victim survived, will return home or be sent to prison. “Would I have bought this house knowing somebody (close by) had an arsenal of weapons? No, I would not have.”

So the reason they published the maps was so that people could check to see if that “weird” guy down the street is a registered gun owner or not supposedly. It still shows very poor judgement in my opinion not just for the reasons already brought up but because it not only shows where the guns are in theory, it also shows where they aren’t. This is great information for wanna-be stalkers and burglars…