You can understand why this particular story might interest me.
From Buzz Feed:
The National Rifle Association has rallied gun owners — and raised tens of millions of dollars — campaigning against the threat of a national database of firearms or their owners.
But in fact, the sort of vast, secret database the NRA often warns of already exists, despite having been assembled largely without the knowledge or consent of gun owners. It is housed in the Virginia offices of the NRA itself. The country’s largest privately held database of current, former, and prospective gun owners is one of the powerful lobby’s secret weapons, expanding its influence well beyond its estimated 3 million members and bolstering its political supremacy.
That database has been built through years of acquiring gun permit registration lists from state and county offices, gathering names of new owners from the thousands of gun safety classes taught by NRA-certified instructors and by buying lists of attendees of gun shows, subscribers to gun magazines, and more, BuzzFeed has learned.
This is not wholly a surprise to me. Back when controversy erupted in Arkansas about public access to the list of concealed carry permit holders -- a controversy since settled by closure of the records by law -- I learned from police that the primary users of that database were gun merchants, the NRA and others in the gun indsutry. It obviously constituted a good marketing list.