Triangle Tactical Podcast and Blog on Guns, Gear, and Competition Shooting
The “Gun Geo Marker” app that we mentioned on Episode 38 popped up on my radar again today when Luke posted a link to an article where the NRA-ILA, bless their hearts, and a Missouri state senator are trying to petition Google to remove the app from the Play Store (their version of Apple’s “App store”):
Google recently released the Gun Geo Marker app which was misguidedly designed to encourage users to “geolocate dangerous guns and owners” in their communities. According to Google Play, “Geolocation means marking dangerous sites on the App’s map so that you and others can be aware of the risks in your neighborhood.” Essentially, this app lent itself to extreme abuses that included exploiting gun owners’ privacy and undermining public safety. For these reasons, and the vocal outrage of opposition from responsible gun owners and Second Amendment supporters, Gun Geo Marker’s intended function has been disabled. Yet, this app has not been removed completely and can still be downloaded in a stymied version.
First of all, Google didn’t “release” anything any more than Apple “releases” weekly episodes of the Triangle Tactical podcast. Google found this app to be within their Terms of Service and so it was automatically posted. It’s interesting, useful, and important to get word out about this attempt to marginalize gun owners, but this inflammatory rhetoric redirects the blame from the app developer to the distributor.
More importantly, though, the press release gets close to the truth, but is just far enough to miss the point. When they say the app is still available in a “stymied” version, what they mean is that the app has been rendered inert. This is because, as even a passing glance at the app in its current form or a quick read through the developer’s blog reveals that the whole thing was a social experiment/honeypot to see how gun owners would react.
They were fishing for outrageous “anti-gun-safety” rhetoric to make a point.
And, unfortunately, they got it. They have a page full of emails and phone calls where people made comments, death threats, and racist remarks about the developers of the app and the criminals they were perceived to be helping. Although the quoted emails and phone calls are inflammatory and almost certainly represent the most extreme 1% of ignorance about the app, its purpose, and functionality, the fact is the developer also reports that “almost all calls projected various paranoid and dark visions on to the App,” indicating that most of the feedback came from people just ignorantly issuing hate about this tacky and stupid attempt by an admitted “gun safety” advocate without informing themselves first.
To be clear, I find the whole app in poor taste and the developer to be wrong about gun violence in America. For example, when he says
Reasonable regulations that do not interfere with anyone’s second amendment rights – such as universal background checks and trigger locks when guns are unattended in the presence of children – are needed to help abate the gun violence epidemic in this country.
as though gun violence were on the rise, you can tell how misinformed he is.
However, let’s be clear: what he did is not illegal. It is not unconstitutional. It is not a war crime or treason, as one caller declared.
What he did was a crowd-sourced, technology-enabled equivalent of printing a newsletter of anonymous tips mailed to him. It was constitutionally protected speech. And the way you respond to speech you dislike is not censorship but instead more speech. And we did that, in two ways: by filling it with bogus data making the app useless and leaving 1-star reviews. On the other hand, sending hateful or ignorant reviews, emails, or phone calls did nothing to help our cause and gave the “gun safety” advocates ammunition.
The anti-gunners are clever and masters of PR and spin. When we oppose things like this, or the MAIG bus tour, it’s important that we remember to be reasonable, courteous, and correct. Trying to say that anything we don’t like is “unconstitutional” is just as bad the lefties who say “there ought to be a law” about everything they don’t like.
Good article. Fair and balanced. Surprising that they feel the need to create the app. Disappointing they got the reaction they were fishing for.