My father, who was a political reporter, and my wife when she was at the Star, used to get odd phone calls from people who didn't like what they'd written, or wanted something written, or wanted to report somebody doing something they shouldn't. Early on I was tutored by my mother to say "He isn't in." But when wife worked for the Frankfort Times and reported on drug use in Clinton County, things escalated to shouted driveby threats on the street. Caller i.d. and answering machines have taken much of the worry out.

There is rumor that someone found a way to hack the paper's source information, a database collected of whom is whom. Gack.

Was I that reporter,Ruth? Can't remember. But I had an unlisted private telephone number in those days. One reason why was because a guy I wrote a number of stories about (he was a felon with a legal gun permit who killed someone -- 60 Minutes eventually covered the story) used to come down to the Star's office in cop shop late at night when I was working to have a "little talk." It was most unsettling to be there at 1 a.m., no one around, me with my back to the door typing out crime statistics and getting "a little visit" from someone who had been upset about my coverage. That said, the unlisted number meant squat.

As to the paper and the gun permits...I think it would have been a legitimate story if it had been reported in a way that linked density of gun ownership to crime (or lack of it) or income or some other context and if the information had been reported in the aggregate rather than the particular.

I thought the whole thing was kind of sad, a misguided attempt to coattail on an attention-grabbing national story making a messy situation messier.

While the "sauce for the gander" response was satisfyingly symmetrical, the problem is that the scary nutjobs of the world probably made note of the newspaper staff's addresses in the same grimy notebook they'd used to copy the gun-owner addresses. All sides forget that this doesn't take place in some sterile lab.