Don’t conceal gun permits from public

Oregon’s excellent public records law allows us to find out, among many other matters, when our neighbors get a marriage license, or register to vote, or apply for a permit to build a fence.

But now many of Oregon’s 36 county sheriffs — including Baker County’s Mitch Southwick — argue that we’re not necessarily entitled to know which of our neighbors have a permit to carry a concealed handgun.

It seems to us that on the roster of government records that citizens ought to have access to, concealed weapons permits rank quite a lot higher than, say, marriage licenses.

Think of it this way: If the government issues a marriage license to a couple who aren’t ready to be married, no one besides the unfortunate pair is likely to be harmed.

But if the government makes a mistake in handing out a handgun permit, someone could get shot who doesn’t deserve it.

Despite the sheriffs’ stance, the Oregon Legislature never intended that concealed weapons permits would be confidential.

When legislators passed the concealed weapons permit law in 1989, they didn’t add those permits to the list of records exempt from public disclosure (records that contain trade secrets, or details about a criminal investigation, are examples of exempt records).

The exemption that sheriffs have cited does not mention concealed weapons permits.

That exemption, ORS 192.445(1), states that government agencies are prohibited from releasing to the public a person’s home address, phone number and e-mail address if “the individual demonstrates to the satisfaction of the public body that the personal safety of the individual or the personal safety of a family member residing with the individual is in danger if the home address, personal telephone number or electronic mail address remains available for public inspection.”

In other words, a person who has a concealed weapons permit can’t hide that fact from the public just because he or she doesn’t want people to know.

This is as it should be.

A concealed weapons permit is, after all, a privilege rather than a right.

And in exchange for receiving that privilege, permit holders should expect that their fellow citizens will have access to the permit records.

We don’t mean to belittle the safety concerns that sheriffs and others have mentioned.

The government’s obligation to make its decisions transparent to the public does not trump any citizen’s well-being.

Yet it’s simply not credible to contend that Oregon’s public records law is a sort of road map that leads stalkers, identity thieves and other criminals right to their victims.

The phone book, after all, is hardly obsolete.

The Oregon Administrative Rule that outlines the process by which people can petition to have their addresses, phone numbers and e-mails blocked from public perusal clearly envisions situations in which the person’s privacy and safety are definitively linked.

The rule lists several pieces of evidence that could justify someone’s request for an exemption to the public records law, among them a restraining order or a police report showing that the person asking for the exemption has been the victim of a stalker.

Undoubtedly, some people who have concealed weapons permits have been victims of such crimes, and we don’t object to the state protecting their personal information.

But we disagree with sheriffs who argue that anyone who has a concealed weapons permit can qualify for that exemption merely by stating that they applied for the permit for security reasons.

Why else would you get such a permit? To plink at ground squirrels?