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Gun-humpers using sexy app to track gun control advocates, what could go wrong?

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New Post has been published on http://americanlivewire.com/gun-geo-marker-android-app-gets-predictably-poor-reviews/

Gun Geo Marker Android App Gets Predictably Poor Reviews

Brett Stalbaum’s latest project, the Gun Geo Marker Android app, was released last week. The Gun Geo marker Android application is a crowdsourced way to “mark sites associated with potentially unsafe guns and gun owners.”

Users haven’t given the Gun Geo Marker Android app very positive reviews so far. Photo: Google Play Store IAW Fair Use

Gun Geo Marker Allows Civilians To Mark Terrorist Threats

The application allows users to “geolocate,” or mark, places where they believe guns may be stored or handled recklessly. Some of the tags Geo Gun Marker users can mark are:

“Possible unlocked/loaded/unsafe storage”

“Guns and unsupervised children”

“Documented/frequent unlawful discharge”

“Possible anti-government/terror threat”

Neighbors Marking Neighbors

Gun Geo Marker’s description states:

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. Electronically marking these locations can help others in the area learn about their geography of risk from gun accidents or violence. No matter what your safety concern with firearms might be, you should feel free to use this tool to provide the most accurate information you can such that others can make their own safety decisions.

Predictably, the Gun Geo Marker app has been “flamed” and has accumulated extremely poor reviews since its July 4 release. Brett Stalbaum, knowing this would be the case, added a reviewing caveat to the app’s description implying posted reviews may not be relevant to the application’s quality and encouraging users to decide for themselves the worth of user-identified dangerous gun sites.

On the Gun Geo Marker website, users are encouraged to make their neighborhoods safer by anonymously marking the locations of guns and “owners of concern.” An owner of concern may be one who does not use a trigger lock or otherwise stores a firearm in a manner a user subjectively feels is “unsafe.” This user-generated information is purported to be a way for people to “help stop child gun deaths.”

Gun Geo Marker App A Partisan Issue?

Also predictably, reviews of the Gun Geo Marker app are almost entirely polarized. Most agree that the Geo Gun Marker app has sky-high potential to be maliciously misused. Some feel that the application is of poor quality and serves no real purpose except to incite fear.  One user’s review quite aptly demonstrates both the ignorance of some potential users and the potential for misuse:

“I got this app because I wanted to know if there were any gun-toting rednecks nearby, as we live near the woods, and G-d knows what kinds of crazy hicks want to shoot my babies! To my relief, it didn’t report anything to me. I later showed this program to my mother, but when I opened the app, I was absolutely shocked to find out that someone had reported my mother as the owner of an “SKS” assault rifle! My mother never touched a gun in her life! This app is nothing but libellous, bald-faced LIES!!! Shame…”

The Geo Gun Marker Android app has a current quality rating of 1.1 on a scale from 1 to 5. Many reviewers have lamented that the scale does not start at zero.