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.
2 replies on “Preventing gun sales to mentally unstable people”
I think you present some really good ideas, and a way to use the ‘evil’ of marketing doing people mining and turning it towards something good and helpful. I think in the end setting up legislation where this kind of data mining was occurring, it would be a legislation that deterred/blocked mentally ill people from legally acquiring firearms but in a way that lets them apply and be turned down in the process.
I still believe that there should be an assault weapons ban, but I like the idea of building a system around gun purchases that is more than sign on the dotted line for a gun at Walmart.
thanks Julia!
I don’t really think data mining is “evil” persay… its all how you use it 🙂 In my view we need to somehow spur the free market to make these changes, I’m not sure if legislation is the answer for 2 reasons:
1.) Forcing people to do things rarely works as well as enticing them to do it. Especially when it comes to more “right wing” gun enthusiasts. I think no matter what it would be viewed by this demographic as a “pwer grab” to their guns…. and its funny because I am even in this demographic. I like guns and value them as a tool to protect myself, however I know that that both sides of this issue would benefit if less mentally unstable people had weapons in their hands.
2.) The only legislation I’ve ever seen work is the smoking ban (meaning I just have little faith in the government to effectively legislate I suppose)
P.S. I’m not pro the assault weapons ban as log as police get to have assault weapons, you have seen first hand with the activities in Ferguson lately that police are not saints. If they can be trusted with an assault rifle then so can I (I’d even argue I would be a much better person to have one than many cops we have seen on TV during the protest shouting they will kill protesters). In the end an assault rifle is just a bigger “tool” and in my view the danger of letting only the government have larger weapons far out weighs the danger of a few mentally unstable people getting assault rifles (governments are not above using force to force citizens to do things they don’t want to do).