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Preventing gun sales to mentally unstable people

Stopping guns from being purchased by mentally unstable people is a pretty big topic in the news lately, and for whatever reason this idea popped into my head today so I decided to think about it for a while.  The common narrative is for the government to legislate a way to help prevent unstable people from buying guns, but seeing as how legislation that prohibits things is so rarely effective I think we would be much better served looking at a way to try and solve this on our own.

It occurred to me that a good place to start when looking for a solution to this would be to look at any company’s who have already solved the problem of weeding out crazy people from using their service. One such company came to mind instantly, AirBnB.  This company digs up so much shit on you when you sign up.  You have to give them your drivers licence and a few other details, and the amount of information they find on you is pretty amazing.  The first thing we should do is take a look at their algorithm and figure out how they are finding so much information about people and model our gun buying protection program after that.

Next when someone is purchasing a gun, an interesting approach we could take is we have the user temporarily download an APP onto their phone as part of the buying process.  This app could:

provide us their email address (which we could also scan for unstable emails)

provide us their login to twitter/facebook/whatever social network they have linked (which we could again scan for unstable messages)

provide us their text messages which we could scan for unstable messages

provide us their website browsing history which we could scan for troublesome website visits

**once the person was cleared they could could delete the app from their phone, and the app would not store any of the data it scanned

**we could incentivize gun stores to have users download and install this app (maybe a tax credit for every customer that does, maybe publicly shame the stores that don’t join the program, maybe just simply ask them to do it and see if the benefit of “doing the right thing” would be all that they need).  To get their buy in we would have to involve them in the process from the start.

Beyond the APP we could also look more into the AirBnB process of doing background checks, looking up school records, looking up a person credit ect… I think the moral of the story is if we look around advertising company’s spend countless millions of dollars data mining people and building profiles on them. All we need to do is look into a way to access this data before selling someone a gun, this type of approach will be much more effective than any kind of legislation.