California’s Gun Store 24/7 Video Surveillance Mandate To Remain In Place

A federal appeals court allowed California’s law requiring gun stores to have 24-hour video and audio surveillance in a ruling handed down Thursday.

The three-judge panel from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which consisted of Biden appointees Lucy H. Koh and Ana de Alba and Trump appointee Kenneth K. Lee, ruled in favor of the state in a challenge from federally licensed firearms dealers (FFLs). The panel split among party lines.

“California’s surveillance law is particularly troubling because there is no plausible law enforcement rationale for audio-recording every conversation at gun stores,” Lee wrote in his dissent, in which he argued the mandate infringed on First and Fourth Amendment rights. “The majority points out that the state justifies this law by claiming that it will help solve gun thefts and illegal straw purchases. True enough, video-recording may help identify criminal suspects—but audio-recording almost certainly does not.”

California’s law, SB 1384, requires gun store owners to maintain various security and surveillance systems in their business establishments, with a requirement to have continuous audio and video surveillance for 24 hours a day, seven days a week which would be retained for a year.

All of this costs money and it’s borne by the retailer,” National Shooting Sports Foundation General Counsel Lawrence Keene told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “There’s only so much that can be done, of course, can be passed on to the consumer. You know, much larger corporate retailers have the wherewithal to absorb that cost, but small mom and pop retailers simply don’t have that capacity. They don’t have that kind of capital they can invest in all this high-tech, very expensive security.”

Storage requirements for a 1080p high-definition camera are about 35 gigabytes (GB) per day per camera, according to Optiview, a company that manufactures surveillance systems. Optiview estimates that the storage space requirements for 30 days at 1080p format would be 640 GB per day for a 16-camera setup – about 19 terabytes (TB) per month, while a calculator from Western Digital puts the storage requirements for keeping one year of footage from a 12-camera system taking 1920×1080 video at just over 181 TB.