Real Reasons Gun Owners Should Be Worried About Flock

Technology can be a wonderful thing, but the problem with tech is that engineers are often so preoccupied with whether they could, they don’t stop to ask if they should. Yeah, that was paraphrased from a bit about scientists in Jurassic Park, but the real monsters we have today are things like Flock cameras.

There are times when I think I’m wearing the tinfoil hat being concerned about these things, but then I spend half a heartbeat and remember that, at least in this, I have rational concerns.

And I’m not the only one. You should have them, too.

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.”

Maybe not a complete list, but more than close enough to be concerning. 

It’s one thing to know that there’s a digital record of you going to a website to buy ammo. It’s another to go in person and be tracked without your knowledge or consent.

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.

Moreover, Rhodes’s comments are far from the totality of the issue. In pro-gun Florida, they have a bigger issue.

Flock Safety, which advertises its license plate readers in conjunction with gunshot detection devices, did not respond to The Reload‘s request for comment on the use of its cameras at shooting ranges or gun stores, but Central Florida has become a recent hotspot in the debate over the practice. There, residents outraged by Flock cameras at the entrance to an Ocala shooting range took to social media in protest. Someone apparently took things a step further by vandalizing the cameras, the vestiges of which were later removed.

The state Commission on Fish and Wildlife operates the public range on federal forest land. The agency did not respond to The Reload‘s requests for comment on why the cameras were installed or removed, but confirmed to the Daytona Beach News-Journal that it was investigating the vandalism. Residents have also posted video of cameras at a range operated by the agency in Osceola, where they reported someone also removed the Flock cameras.

“At the gun range the only thing they can track is gun owners, that driveway goes nowhere else,” Patrick McGeehan, a Daytona Beach criminal defense attorney and former homicide detective for the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, told The Reload. He is one of the residents who first posted about the presence and destruction of the cameras at the Ocala gun range.

“I want to know what data they are collecting, how they are using that data, who accesses that data, is it being used to train AI, what is the commercial value of that data,” McGeehan said.

Yeah, I’m with McGeehan here. This is a massive red flag because, as noted, the only thing they can track is gun owners. There’s apparently nothing else that way that could be tracked. This isn’t looking for poachers on state land. This is tracking the lawful activities of people exercising their constitutionally protected rights.

I want to know just what they’re looking for.

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.

Plus, there are always the Punisher skulls, the military service stickers, and so on, which can all paint a picture of who is behind the wheel.

If ever there was a time to really work at being a gray man, now is it.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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