Magdalena Cerdá and Garen Wintemute are epidemiological researchers with US Davis's Violence Prevention Research Program; when they witnessed the Trump administration's mass-deletion of publicly funded EPA research, they feared gun violence stats would be next.
Ever since, they've been tasking their small team of researchers to download as much of this tax-funded science as possible, to preserve it in the event that Trump orders its destruction (there's precedent: GWB ordered government employees to destroy ATF gun violence data from 2001 and 2002 before it could be published).
In many cases, federal information is vital to research in these fields. “I was scared,” says Veronica Pear, a data analyst at the Violence Prevention Research Center. She’s using federal data for a paper on firearm mortality—tracking hotspots in California between 1999 and 2015—and her work is almost complete. Since the federal query system makes it easy to search the data but cumbersome to download, Pear had never bothered to save the information to her computer. To catch up, “I had to enter around 50 different queries,” she says. “I felt frantic.”
After about five hours spent in a flurry of activity, the team had downloaded everything they could think of. Now, it’s stored on a secure server at UC Davis, ready if gun violence researchers ever do lose access to federal data on firearm licenses, sales, use in criminal activity, and deaths. It’s not as large of an effort as the climate data scraping executed in recent weeks—the datasets numbered in the tens rather than thousands—but that doesn’t mean the UC Davis team’s work was insignificant. Thanks to funding issues and opposition from the National Rifle Association, very little gun-related data exists. Every scrap counts. “There aren’t a lot of different kinds of data, but they are foundational,” says Wintemute. “Every research study on firearm violence begins with a statement on the size of the problem. That’s what these data provide.”
Should the information disappear from the web, the UC Davis team will have no qualms sharing it. “I think of it is as a public service for the scientific community,” says Pear. “And for me, it feels more important now than ever to be vocally on the side of truth.”
Gun Violence Researchers Race to Protect Data From Trump [Emma Grey Ellis/Wired]
(Image: Inside of the riffled barrel of a French 75mm gun of the First World War, Med, CC-BY-SA)
