Gun rights blogger: App lets consumers network to ID ‘gun free zone’ businesses

by Chad D. Baus

Gun rights blogger David Codrea has discovered that for those wanting to help create a comprehensive list of dangerous "victim zone" businesses which prevent law-abiding customers from protecting themselves by posting 'no-guns' signs that alert criminals everyone inside is defenseless, there's an app for that!

From the article:

"Whether you want to shop in gun free zones as often as possible or avoid them altogether, this app will help you shop, play, and do business with like-minded people,” the app website states, linking to download pages at Google, Amazon and Apple. Importantly, their privacy policy pledges "The Gun Free Zone App does not collect or store any personal information. Your privacy is completely protected."

This is intriguing, because such efforts have been tried before, mostly resulting in a localized patchwork with gaping holes, dependent on website administrators to validate and update based on email tips, difficult for anyone not familiar with a specific site to even know about, let alone find, and that's assuming there's enough interest to warrant keeping such pages updated.

"I think it can change the gun debate permanently," John Peden, a Utah resident and the mind behind the app told Gun Rights Examiner.

"I thought up the Gun Free Zone app as a response to the newspaper in New York putting the names and addresses of the gun owners on a map on their website," he recalled. "I decided I'm not going to print the names and addresses of non-gun owners or the editors of the paper (like some folks did) but I can fight back economically since there are over 60 million gun owners in the US. I sat down with a friend who is a programmer, explained to him the basics of what the app does now, and we got to work.

"My initial goal was economic warfare against the left and I wanted to fight," he continued. "I still do. My end goal is to push policy towards ending gun free zones and strengthening the Second Amendment. I want to use the app to educate the low-information voters on what a gun free zone actually means to them.

According to the article, users of the app mark stores and businesses as either gun free zones or not gun free zones. That information is then stored and shared with other users. Peden is already planning various upgrades.

Click here to read Codrea's entire article.

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Vice Chairman.