Predictive technology has been used for years against consumers. Why aren't we using it against potential mass shooters?
Let's flag unusually large gun or ammunition purchases the same way we flag suspicious charges to prevent credit card fraud
Some years ago I attended a convention in Minneapolis, and during that conference I purchased books and CDs in the conference exhibit hall. I used a debit card to purchase them.
This was back in the days before chipped cards, even before card-swipe readers. They took an impression of the raised letters and numbers on your card by pressing them into a multipart carbon-paper equipped transaction document. They gave you a copy from the deck of forms and kept the others for processing. The carbon paper got thrown in the trash.
It wasn’t until I returned to the office after this trip that I received a voice mail from the bank’s card security department asking me to confirm some suspicious transactions. It turns out that while I was in Minneapolis, I was also in Paramus, NJ, buying large ticket items at Best Buy.
The bank’s ironclad promise to protect customers was kept, I wasn’t out of pocket any money, and only had the inconvenience of having to get a new card and change recurring payments. The usual post-fraud stuff.
But what has me thinking about this again is the shooting in Minneapolis that took two sweet little children from their families and upended the lives of an entire community.
Banks and credit card companies have an enormous amount of information about our transaction behavior, and they can use it predictively to spot transactions that are unusual. In my case, they knew the card was being used in Minneapolis, so it caught their computers’ interest that it was also being used in Paramus. Someone obviously retrieved the carbon paper from the trash and shared the card information with a collaborator in Paramus.
We’ve all heard the anecdote about Target sending coupons to a young woman because her purchasing pattern suggested that she was pregnant.
Target’s internal analysis of purchasing patterns found a strong correlation between certain purchases and the likelihood that the purchaser was pregnant, so they started sending paper coupons to those shoppers for baby products that they thought the shoppers would appreciate.
The woman’s father came into the store indignant that they sent his teenage daughter coupons for baby products. Two weeks later he came back to apologize because she was pregnant and had been afraid to tell him.
The point is that the purchases she made predicted accurately her pregnancy status.
So why don’t we demand that card processors and law enforcement use this technology to monitor gun and ammunition purchases?
I’m not suggesting regulations. We’ve failed so many times to put minimal restrictions on guns that it almost seems whimsical to try again.
What I’m suggesting is that we use the same predictive technology to monitor the pattern of gun and ammunition purchases to flag unusual patterns for further scrutiny.
If someone who has never purchased a gun is suddenly buying an AR-15 every month, or purchasing a higher amount of ammunition than previously, couldn’t that be used to trigger a request to local law enforcement to just check on the person?
Couldn’t we go back to previous mass shootings and gather information on the shooters’ buying habits and use that to build a predictive model?
I’m not arguing for prosecuting “thought crime.” I’m suggesting that we are failing our children by not using the technology we use to predict what they want to buy to protect them from people who are buying in preparation for a crime.
If someone comes to ask a buyer about their unusual gun/ammo purchases before they use them, maybe they can get the mental health help they need before people are hurt or killed.
This shouldn’t be hard to implement. The technology is already quite advanced (everyone knows how ads show up on Facebook for products you’ve been think about buying but haven’t even Google-searched yet.)
Why aren’t we identifying these potential risks before these shootings happen? What are we afraid of?
I like the idea.
Of course , every time a democrat gets elected (will that ever happen again?) gun and ammunition sales spike.
I always thought the carbon papers were torn in half when the multipart forms were separated.
But: somebody will say this is infringing on their second amendment rights. Guns are still more important than people.
That’s a powerful point if predictive tech can influence what we buy, it feels like it should also be leveraged to help prevent tragedies and save lives.