This is a speech given by Evan DeFilippis, John Brownstein, and Ben Reis in Austin, TX for SXSW on the state of data in the gun violence debate.
Gun-related violence in the U.S. is a public health crisis, with nearly 100,000 people injured or killed each year. Despite the critical need for timely data on gun violence, laws and regulations often prohibit comprehensive data collection. The emergence of non-traditional data sources –online news, Google, and Twitter– has already been used to track a wide range of public health phenomena, such as the spread of influenza, and now has the potential to track gun usage and opinions. This session will demonstrate and discuss a brand new publicly-accessible interactive platform that provides real-time information and forecasts, on gun ownership and gun violence in searchable geographic are