Gun-owners, beware: There’s now an app that allows people to expose the home addresses of people whose gun practices they deem to be potentially unsafe.
The Gun Geo Marker app, which was released in the Google Play app store earlier this week, touts itself as data-collection tool that can help create a safer environment by enabling community members to ”mark, or geolocate, sites associated with potentially unsafe guns and gun owners.”
“These locations are typically the homes or businesses of suspected unsafe gun owners, but might also be public lands or other locations where guns are not handled safely, or situations where proper rights to own or use any particular type of firearm may not exist,” the app’s website states.
Naturally, the app has come under a great deal of scrutiny, as many people believe it to be an invasion of their privacy and a threat to the safety of gun owners and non-gun owners alike.
“This is dangerous and invasive,” Levi Russell wrote in a review of the app, according to Fox News. “Dangerous because it allows criminals to determine where they might steal firearms….you are an accomplice to any firearm theft that will occur due to the existence of this app.”
John Lott, a gun expert and author of the book “More Guns, Less Crime,” also told Fox News that “this makes those who don’t have guns an easier target for criminals. It’s a safety issue.”
“I’ve debated a lot of gun control advocates over the years,” Lott said. “I’ve never met someone who has been willing to put up a sign in front of their house indicating that their home is a gun-free zone.”
App developer Brett Stalbaum, a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego, has fought back against much of the criticism he’s faced over the app.
“The gun rights community has been busy making personal threats (we remain unconcerned), as well as spamming the Gun Geo Marker database with false markers,” Stalbaum exclusively told Fox News. “Though these fake markers are not useful for identifying dangerous guns and owners, they are certainly representative of the highly paranoid reaction we have come to expect from any attempt to improve gun safety in the United States
He added that “this kind of reaction — automatically lining up on the wrong side of reasonable measures to improve the safe use and ownership of guns — aids and abets the crisis of child shooting deaths.”
The controversy surrounding the new app is similar to the one surrounding the decision by a New York newspaper to publish the names and addresses of gun owners in the area. The paper was forced to remove the data soon afterwards after receiving numerous threats – including the posting of addresses of the paper’s staff on the Internet.
After that incident, several break-ins were reported at the listed houses and it’s believed that the burglars went straight for the owner’s guns.
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