Gun crime and big data

One of the things that I can hardly understand as a foreigner is the gun crime in US. Many casualties have been caused by guns and the media deals with those accidents as a very critical issue in US whenever they occur. So, I searched some relevant articles which shows the benefits of big data phenomenon in solving gun crimes.

David McNew, the writer of theAtlantic.com, pointed out there is no national database of gun owners, and no national record-keeping of firearm and ammunition purchases, and most states don't even require a license to buy or keep a gun. He notices that there is an opposition to this idea regarding private advocates. He exemplifies recent mass killers of the gun-acquiring backgrounds, such as James Holmes, the Aurora shooting suspect, Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Elementary school tragic accidents suspect, and Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooting suspect. They could acquire guns and ammunitions without careful background check and they could even buy them through the Internet.
The writer shows a kind of solution for this problem with Netflix, which has 24 million users and will stream billion movies a year, Walmart, or Twitter, which had 12 million in the first hour after Osama bin Laden was killed. For another example of this problem, he describes security check for flight and asking ID when buying medicine in a pharmacy. The writer emphasizes this problem can be solved by politicians' decision for using big data technology and this is not because of technical difficulty.

Derrick Wlodarz, the contributor of betanews.com, mentions that gun control is not about big data but about politics, too. He says the new proposed gun control has a wrong direction for this problem. That is, this control attempts to clarify what visual aspects of guns constitute assault weapons, even though handguns are the most prevalent choice for mass shootings. As a solution for this problem, the writer also suggests information sharing, for example, mental illness of gun buyers, to prevent the next sad news.

The common opinions between two articles are that big data will be very useful to enhance gun control system and prevent tragedies in the future. However, there should be a obvious drawback from my standpoint. Underlying assumption of big data is the all the data should be collected, but the reality is not. There are tons of trades occurring in the gun show for secondhand guns with cash and there are mountains of guns sold in the street. If a situation like this continues, tragedies caused by guns will be continued. I think big data will solve just a part of the gun problem unless preceding conditions of collecting data is accomplished.

Reference:
1. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/12/how-big-data-can-solve-americas-gun-problem/266633/
2. http://betanews.com/2013/02/06/big-data-can-kill-american-gun-crime/