At Mother Jones, iWatchNews reporter Rick Schmitt details the chilling tale of a journalist who got on the wrong side of Buckeye Firearms Association, an Ohio gun rights group closely tied to the National Rifle Association.

Matt Westerhold is the managing editor of the small Ohio daily the Sandusky Register. Westerhold tells Schmitt that after Ohio passed a bill legalizing the concealed carry of firearms, he received numerous requests from readers who wanted to know if their neighbors had applied for carry permits. After three years of such requests, Westerhold began publishing the names and birth dates of permit holders on the paper's website (permit holder data was publicly available at the time).

Gun rights activists were not pleased. Westerhold says that he received numerous death threats, and that Buckeye Firearms responded by publishing a wide variety of personal information about Westerhold, as well as "information on how one might find out which public school Westerhold's 12-year-old daughter attended, which bus she took there, and how a photo of the girl from her school yearbook could probably be found in the local library":

The reaction was fast and furious. “I was getting phone calls from all over the country, hundreds of phone calls,” Westerhold says. “There were so many nut jobs. There were so many threats: 'I am going to kill you' and 'You should die slowly'.”

Then the Buckeye Firearms Association got involved, Westerhold says, “in a very pro-active way.” Using public records, the group posted on its website Westerhold's auto records, a traffic citation, a partial Social Security number, an address for property he owned, and details about his divorce and ex-wife. It also included information on how one might find out which public school Westerhold's 12-year-old daughter attended, which bus she took there, and how a photo of the girl from her school yearbook could probably be found in the local library.

“I never experienced anything like that in my life,” Westerhold says. He says he consulted an attorney and took the information to a local prosecutor, who found no grounds to take action.

Buckeye Firearms chairman James Irvine told Schmitt that he “did not publish the information about Westerhold to be vindictive, but rather to show the editor how easily a 'bad guy' might get information on any one of the people on the list that the Sandusky Register had published.” That seems like the sort of message that could have been conveyed privately instead.

If Buckeye Firearms' goal was to intimidate a reporter, it worked. Westerhold says he has “never sought to follow up or do anything with the list.”