Vice President Joe Biden held a web meeting today on reducing gun violence in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. In a Google Hangout, Biden said he met with 228 groups, including video game company executives, physicians, researchers, and experts on gun violence. Midway through the hangout, the conversation turned to the topic of violent video games.

The conversation showed that violent video games are still high on the list of concerns that people have in the wake of recent school shootings. Among the participants who shot questions at Biden were Silicon Valley entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, YouTube video host Philip DeFranco, Theresa Tillman (who is considering buying a gun), and family blogger and child therapist Kimberly Blaine. The “fireside hangout” event was hosted by Hari Sreenivasan of the PBS NewsHour.

The vice president didn’t condemn violent video games, but his choice of words showed where Biden leans. He noted that the car industry opposed studies on crash research for many years because they didn’t want to have that research used in arguments for more car safety, which would raise the costs of making cars.

“The one thing that bothers me is there’s part of the interest group population out there that are afraid of facts,” Biden said. “Let the facts lead where they will and let the research be done,” Biden said. “That’s one of things that the president and I believe very strongly: Let the facts work.”

He added, “There is no hard data about whether or not these excessively violent video games in fact cause people to engage in behavior that is antisocial, including using guns. There is one study done, the American Academy of Pediatrics. They said if you watch three to six hours of video games — and a lot of kids do that — leads to aggressive behavior. They didn’t make the next connection that it leads to violent behavior. But there are no studies done. I recommended to the President we do the research.”

He said the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health should investigate the pathology behind gun violence.

“We shouldn’t be afraid of the facts,” he said.

The game industry has maintained that there have been a lot of studies done over the past two decades and none of them have shown that games cause violent behavior. DeFranco pointed out that $10 million in research has been done on violent media. The International Game Developers Association, the Entertainment Consumers Association, and the Entertainment Software Association have all urged Biden not to jump the gun and blame video games for violent behavior.

Biden said that the assault weapons ban, which expired after a decade, wasn’t a failure because it had reduced the number of casualties among law enforcement, which is increasingly outgunned by criminals. He said it is OK to put reasonable limits on gun ownership without infringing on sporting or self-defense rights. Biden said he supports beefing up mental health resources, particularly for educators, to detect aberrant individuals before they become violent. Biden said he met with the National Rifle Association, which objects to restrictions because they lead to a “slippery slope” toward banning guns.

Here’s the video below.

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In the wake of the tragic events in Newtown, Conn., The Atlantic writer Marc Parrish called for a basic database to track and flag rapid weapon buildups and suspicious purchases.

“‘Big data’ might have stopped the massacres in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek,” Parrish wrote, and he goes on to argue that tracking and analyzing ammunition and gun purchases would be “trivial” from a technology perspective, in comparison to vast efforts of large marketing departments to understand the buying patterns of current and potential customers.

VentureBeat invited entrepreneur Bruno Aziza and blogger Andrew Brust for a first-of-its-kind debate on whether Big Data is a solution to America’s big gun problem. Which side do you agree with?

Both our experts reference the film Minority Report as the potential of big data goes far further than a database. Parrish argues that “red flags,” or anomalies, would emerge from this pool of data, alerting the authorities to potential suspects. This variety of “precrime” detection is nothing new. As Bloomberg Businessweek reported, predictive analytics technologies are being used by law enforcement agencies to identify patterns of suspicious behavior among ex-cons in Salt Lake City.

So, is the next logical step to build big data tools and technologies to solve America’s gun problem? Or is this a fundamentally flawed premise, which would be rife with false positives? (In the comments section of The Atlantic piece, one gun owner notes that spree shooters use relatively small quantities of ammunition compared to the average enthusiast, and “regular violent criminals, even less.”)

And should technology be part of the conversation, or is it masking larger issues related to mental health and the proliferation of assault weapons?

Yes: But getting the data won’t be easy

Andrew Brust, big data blogger, and founder and CEO of Blue Badge Insights

Most monitoring of actions, status, and behavior has big data potential.  That means data around gun and ammunition purchases could be gathered and analyzed, too. It could be used to build predictive models and then forecast who might buy guns and who might use them.

Given historical data about known offenders’ purchases – both legal and illegal – data professionals could perform very useful analyses. For example, questions like “show me all registered gun owners who made five or more ammunition purchases in a 30-day period” become easy to answer. So too would queries to discover correlations and affinities, like “list the top five misdemeanor offenses committed by convicted gun violence perpetrators.” Perhaps more important, the same data could be used to build predictive models.  These models could then be used to analyze activities of nonoffenders and predict candidates for violent activity in the future.

This may sound like something out of the film Minority Report, but the technology is nonetheless quite real.  In fact, queries like those in the previous examples constitute garden-variety analytics work. And given the volumes of data around gun violence, we might not even need recent-vintage big data technology. Instead, the data mining and business intelligence technology that we’ve had for a decade or more would probably work very well.

But this isn’t just a question of technology — it’s a question of privacy, forensics, and interagency cooperation. What purchase data is relevant? And which of it is legal to amass and analyze for nonoffenders? Why would retailers share that data? How would we get agencies like the FBI and ATF to cooperate? Even if we could, how would we get the feds to work with state and local law enforcement?

Given ample data that is clean and consistent, building analytical databases and predictive models on it isn’t that hard. What is hard is getting through the politics necessary to gain access to the data and fostering the cooperation necessary to achieve the data’s cleanliness and consistency.

Corporate analytics projects face the same challenges: Most data in the enterprise is “silo-ed” and the teams who collect and curate it are similarly segregated — and sometimes adversarial. Now, move from the corporate setting to one involving a variety of private and public sector data sources, many of them subject to significant regulation, and you can understand why technology is the manageable part of the problem.

The technology of today can quite likely saves lives in the future, but only if the resulting ethical questions are examined and the hard work of human teamwork gets prioritized and gets done. In the end, this is less about big data and more about commitment, contemplation, careful planning, and political will.

No: It would deliver far too many false positives

Bruno Aziza, SiSense vice president of marketing

If you are a parent, you can’t help but reflect on the tragedy that hit Newtown Elementary school this December. And as a big data activist, I would love to believe that our ability to store, process, and analyze larger amounts of complex data could help us prevent such anomalies.

But I’m saddened to say that big data can’t solve this nation’s gun control issue or prevent events like the Newtown shooting.

While many have eluded to the potential benefits of a creating a national database of gun owners and better record-keeping for firearm and ammunition purchases, the issue with gun control has little to do with the data we have about the purchasers.

There is certainly room for better tracking: Most U.S. states still don’t require a license to purchase a gun. What if we created a unique ID that each buyer would be required to use when purchasing guns or ammunition? Equipped with such technology, we could reconcile purchases made online or at physical stores and detect patterns across various time periods and locations. This is a problem that we already know how to solve. Every retailer calls it “multichannel” intelligence.

But every retailer also knows that it is practically impossible to understand the usage patterns of a customer. In America, like in many other countries, guns are often purchased as gifts, descended from generation to generation. Buying patterns tell us little about usage. Short of putting sensors on gun owners and their gear, no technology can solve this issue.

What if we created at “killer’s attributes set” and ran its factors across the entire U.S. population? We could correlate attributes of a buyer, potential users, and their habits and aggregate all that data to “pre-identify” offenders, just like the hit film Minority Report. But this would not be a solution to a “big data” problem; it would be a “no data” problem because the data required to complete this set is currently not tracked anywhere.

Assuming that we could solve this issue though, I can’t help but think that such methods would be highly contested. On the simple issue of regulation, progun pundits deny the correlation between Great Britain’s stronger gun control laws its lower murder rates. It’d be hard to convince them of the validity of a highly correlated attribute set.

Moreover, as a society, we were to come to an agreement and open up free access to such personal information, who would be the guardian of the data? Who would guarantee that the models used for “precrime” wouldn’t be manipulated for some government’s benefits?

The debates I’ve read on gun control have been far from rational: They are punctuated by personal attacks, tales of conspiracy, and false debates around data justifying the need to own guns for protection. The fate of this issue rests in your government and its leadership. Big data can’t help here, I’m afraid.

Do you agree with our experts? Please weigh in with your thoughts in the comments section.

Gun on Constitution via Sascha Burkard // Shutterstock

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At VentureBeat, we haven’t had much to say about last week’s mass school shooting at Sandy Hook. We didn’t feel it was our place to do so, and we thought a respectful silence on the subject — and the controversial adjacent topics of mental health and national gun laws — was the best course for a tech and business publication like ours.

Today, we and many of our colleagues around the web are observing an Internet moment of silence, starting at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, to honor the families and the lost loved ones in the Sandy Hook community and to do something about gun violence.

It is every human’s most natural instinct to want to help those we see suffering. We don’t want to make a political statement about guns or use this tragedy to promote ourselves in any way. What we will offer, however, are a few ways you can materially help those directly affected by the shooting: The parents and families who lost children and siblings.

For the next five minutes, please think about helping out however you can.

Newtown Youth & Family Services

Newtown Youth & Family Services is currently offering emergency counseling for Sandy Hook families, community members, and staff. Moreover, the organization states on its website, “Kids in Crisis will be at Newtown Youth & Family Services to provide emotional and therapeutic support for parents, students, and school staff. We will have numerous professionals (psychologist, psychiatrists and clinicians) available. No appointments are necessary.” Newtown Youth & Family Services is still assessing community needs and will likely need clinical and community volunteers in the near future.

The Newtown Memorial Fund

“Created by a Newtown parent in response to the tragedy, the Newtown Memorial Fund’s mission is to create a long-term fund to provide a memorial to those who were lost and to establish academic scholarships for classmates and generations of Newtown students to come.”

The fund was established by community member Brian Mauriello, who told reporters, “I’ve chosen to do something that I think this community will need — not just today or next year, but for generations to come. We need an enduring memorial fund. No amount of money will bring back our loved ones, but our hope is that through the centralization of others’ gifts and fundraising work, coupled with our own, we will achieve much more. An integrated approach will provide immediate support, while helping to ensure the victims’ memories are preserved as we make strides for our community to be improved in the future.”

The Fairfield County Community Foundation

This foundation has established a special fundraising effort to address mental health needs in the area “to address the systemic issues raised by the Sandy Hook tragedy.” The foundation provildes philanthropic support to advisory services and nonprofits in the area. Already, the foundation has a Fund for Health and Wellness, which specifically earmarks funds for mental health and substance abuse services.

United Way, Western Connecticut

The United Way in Western Connecticut is also accepting donations. Many individual families impacted by the shooting are doing individual fundraisers to meet their family needs; United Way is preparing to support these and other Sandy Hook community members as soon as needs become identifiable. “As people from our area and beyond respond to this heartbreaking tragedy, they are turning to United Way looking for ways to help. In response, United Way of Western Connecticut in partnership with Newtown Savings Bank has created the ‘Sandy Hook School Support Fund’ that will be able to provide support services to the families and community that has been affected.”

Newtown Parent Connection

The Newtown Parent Connection is collecting donations. The grassroots organization offers meetings and support groups in partnership with Newtown Social Services and the nonprofit Family Counseling Center to address substance abuse issues in the community and to offer clinical and counseling services. On its website, the organization states, “We are continuing to work to provide assistance and hope for the victims’ families and the Newtown/Sandy Hook community who have been affected by this devastating tragedy.”

Image credit: ValleyIndy/Flickr