Federal Gun Control Requires IT Overhaul

New submitter Matt Slaybaugh writes "John Foley at InformationWeek has an editorial saying that the missing piece in the new gun control legislation is adequate data management. 'President Obama introduced 23 executive orders on Jan. 16 aimed at reducing gun violence through a combination of tougher regulation and enforcement, research, training, education and attention to mental healthcare. Several of the proposed actions involve better information sharing, including requiring federal agencies to make relevant data available to the FBI's background check system and easing legal barriers that prevent states from contributing data to that system.' But concrete plans are needed now to improve the current poor system of data collection and sharing. Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel's Digital Government Strategy, introduced in May, 'defines an IT architecture and processes for sharing digitized content securely, using Web APIs and with attention to protecting privacy. ... Unfortunately, on top of the data quality issues identified by the White House, and the FBI's and ATF's outdated IT systems, there's a lack of transparency about the systems used to enforce federal gun-control laws.'"

Comments

Re:Reduce gun violence?

[Curunir_wolf]

If you call the police and say: "somebody is trying to kill me", you will have a whole bunch of police units coming to you to protect you.

Riiiiiiiight... That ALWAYS works, doesn't it? I can't think of one single incident where a threatened person called the police and they failed to arrive before the killing occurred. Oh, wait, I have that backwards, don't I?

And, BTW, there have been numerous cases where the courts have made it explicitly clear that police are under NO obligation WHATSOEVER to protect anyone.