The increasing prevalence of surveillance cameras, especially the automated license plate readers operated by Flock Safety and its competitors, has raised privacy concerns across the country. The concern is not limited to gun owners, but many are particularly worried about cameras at gun ranges and gun shops that have the potential to track them specifically–possibly even to create de facto registries of gun owners.
The cameras don’t only record license plates, notes Taylor Rhodes, executive director and vice president of the National Association for Gun Rights. “They log make, color, body type, any accessories you have on your vehicle…it tracks bumper stickers,” he told The Reload. “How many gun group stickers are on the back of cars? How many Glock stickers are on trucks?”
“The state can ask for everyone who has been to this shooting range, this gun store,” he said, and then “they have a de facto list of gun owners.”
It’s one thing to know that there is a digital record of you going to a website to buy ammo. Now you have to be understand that with the number of cameras showing up around the country, they can not track you when you go to a gun store or sporting goods store in person. Yes, it’s in public, but when you’ve got cameras on every street corner that are tracking me from my house to the store and back, we’ve got a problem.
Because even if it’s above board, there are issues.
Recently, in Franklin County, NC, Detective Janet Leonard was fired after Sheriff Kevin White learned via an internal audit that Leonard was reportedly tracking every movement of a private citizen who wasn’t a suspect in any crime. White made the right call and suspended the use of Flock cameras in the county, but this is one of the issues with Flock.
It’s not whether or not they’re intended for such a use; it’s that they can be used for such a use.
For gun owners, that’s an even bigger problem, because Leonard didn’t (allegedly) have to do all that much to track a single person. Neither did any of the other people who have been fired for misusing these cameras, including at least five in my city. What makes it a bigger problem is that these cameras are pointing toward gun stores, gun ranges, and capture all of those stickers on the back of cars, such as those reading “NRA Lifetime Member” or “Gun Owners of America,” to say nothing of the various brand decals.
Think about it…
