Alabama Gun Owners Needed a Champion on Flock. Katie Britt Asked for “Guidance.”

Guest Opinion by Taylor D. Rhodes

In 2024, Alabama made it illegal for banks and payment networks to single out purchases at gun stores. And state law bars the government from keeping a registry of privately owned guns or their owners, outside of criminal investigations.

Alabama established those boundaries to prevent government intrusion. Your gun purchases and where you exercise your Second Amendment freedoms are none of the government's business.

But today, a camera off the side of the road can log your vehicle on the way to a gun store, a range, or a gun show, with all the records going into a massive database that is easily scanned by AI, and lucky us… Alabama has about 2,800 of them.

On Sept. 23, the U.S. Senate finally took a much-needed look into the surveillance network. Sen. Josh Hawley’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network,” and Alabama’s own Sen. Katie Britt was sitting at the dais.

Before the hearing, BamaCarry and my team at the National Association for Gun Rights contacted Britt’s office with a short (very reasonable) list of questions on behalf of Alabama gun owners. Can police aim these cameras at gun stores, ranges, and gun shows? What level of suspicion does it take to search a gun owner’s movements? Can ATF get the data just by asking a local department? What stops all of this from becoming a gun owner registry under another name? Etc.

Senator Britt didn’t ask one of them.

Instead, she opened by insisting that “two things can be true at the same time.” She acknowledged the Fourth Amendment concerns and even conceded that the problem has already reached Alabama: “We’ve seen misuse and abuse in Alabama as well.”

Then she spent her questions on the one law enforcement witness at the table, asking the sheriff for “legitimate uses” of the technology and a success story. When she asked what safeguards should look like, she asked the sheriff again, and he pointed to guidelines the sheriffs’ associations had just written for themselves.

To me, that’s like letting your child grade their own homework.

To be fair, she did mention “gun owners”… once. The reference was buried in a broader list that included domestic violence victims and “everything in between,” before she called the use of this technology to harass or track people “absolutely completely unacceptable.”

She’s right. So, what is she going to do about it?

Her answer came moments later. There are things, she said, “that we could be doing that we’re not doing now that we could demand.” The demand she named was “making sure that DOJ does its part.” She pointed to a letter she’d sent the day before asking the Justice Department for “the proper oversight, the proper guidance,” and said, “we hope” state and local police get it.

Hope is never a strategy, and it certainly can’t be a safeguard. As gun owners are far too familiar with, guidance isn’t law, and the next attorney general can rewrite it with a stroke of the pen. And don’t forget, the Justice Department is home to ATF, the last agency gun owners want setting the rules for a backdoor gun registry tracking their every move.

After reading the letter, it’s exactly what you’d expect when Washington goes “bipartisan.” It treats the problem as rogue officers stalking romantic partners, defends the “legitimate use” of the technology, and politely begs the DOJ to answer six questions within a month. It never once mentions the clear constitutional concerns of Flock cameras. What should trouble Alabama gun owners most is who she chose to sign it with.

I don’t doubt Senator Britt could’ve easily linked arms with Josh Hawley, the Republican who called this hearing and was the first Senator to begin investigating Flock. Instead, her partner was Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock, one of the Senate’s most reliable votes for gun control.

Warnock was an original cosponsor of the Assault Weapons Ban of 2023. He cosponsored universal background check legislation, the kind gun owners have long warned can’t be enforced without a registry. He voted for the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which sent $750 million to states for crisis intervention programs, with “Red Flag” Gun Confiscation laws as the flagship program.

On top of all that, Warnock voted to confirm Steve Dettelbach to lead Joe Biden’s ATF, which went on to target pistol braces and forced reset triggers. And in 2023, he helped lead a letter urging the ATF to issue new rules aimed at private gun sellers.

That’s who Alabama’s “conservative” senator chose to stand beside on the question of who gets to track your movements.

What makes this so frustrating is that Senator Britt is no bystander. She chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that writes the Department of Homeland Security’s budget. 

She has the power as an elected US Senator. She can sponsor a bill. “Something has to be done here,” she said. She’s the someone to do “something”… but whether she will be is the real question.

And a ban is exactly what gun owners want.

The Founders understood the danger of giving government the power to search broadly in hopes of finding something incriminating. That history helped give us the Fourth Amendment. But this is also a Second Amendment issue: if exercising your right to buy a firearm, visit a gun store, or go to a shooting range creates a searchable trail of your movements, that right comes with a government-accessible record of who exercised it.

This should have been the easiest win in Washington. Witnesses from the ACLU to the libertarian-leaning Institute for Justice sat at the same table. Republican leaders in Montgomery like State Sen. Arthur Orr and Rep. Ernie Yarbrough are already calling the status quo unacceptable. Concern over Flock now runs from one end of the political spectrum to the other.

But Washington has a sinister way of shrinking a politician's world down to the consultant class. The people who keep Katie Britt in her seat aren’t consultants. They’re the red-blooded Alabamians who don’t want a camera logging their next trip to the gun store or range.

Call Senator Britt’s Washington office at 202-224-5744 and tell her where you stand on Flock cameras.

Then, make your voice heard by signing the petition to BAN Flock Cameras in Alabama at DeFlockAlabama.com.

Taylor Rhodes is Executive Vice President of BamaCarry and Executive Director of the National Association for Gun Rights. A Southern Miss and Liberty University graduate, he has spent nearly a decade in the fight for gun rights. He and his family live in Hoover, Ala., and are members of Hunter Street Baptist Church.

For more information, visit https://bamacarry.us or follow BamaCarry on X or on Facebook.