A secret database was found during the investigation into Thomas Crooks, the shooter who tried to assasinate Donald Trump during a rally in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Investigators discovered that both Crooks, and his father were part of a gun owner database, along with millions of registered voters who happen to own guns.
Yes, you read that correctly. Donald Trump’s campaign has a database of gun owners. Would we have found out about this secret database if it hadn’t been discovered in this investigation? Channel 4 News has more information.
From Channel 4 News, the outlet that broke this story:
“Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign database, obtained by Channel 4 News in 2020, lists the assailant’s parents Matthew, and his wife Mary, 53, as living at a residence in the borough of Bethel Park, south of Pittsburgh.
They were among 6.7 million people in the swing state of Pennsylvania profiled for their likely ownership of firearms. Both scored highly, with Crook’s father Matthew given particularly high scores.
Data scientists can analyse relatively small original datasets to determine the characteristics that would make someone likely, for example, to be a gun owner. Using machine learning they can generate models that match those characteristics across the population, assigning individuals a likelihood score.
The gun-related profiles which appear in the 2016 Trump campaign database range between 0 – meaning no likelihood – and 1 – a certainty.
Matthew Crooks scored highly across a range of gun-related models including: 0.99 for the likelihood of returning a warranty card for a firearms purchase; 0.95 for the likelihood of pursuing hunting sports; and 0.94 for the likelihood of shopping at the hunting retailer
Overall, averaged across all three of these measures, out of more than 19,000 people in Bethel Park, Matthew Crooks was among the top 20 highest scoring individuals.
In total, the data technique was deployed in ten swing states – scoring a total of around 50 million individuals – to find voters who could be susceptible to political messages about gun-rights, a bedrock issue in all of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns.
While the Crooks family were assigned scores derived from models, such models are not necessarily accurate and may not reflect the Crooks family’s actual views or gun ownership at that time.
Channel 4 News has approached the Trump campaign for comment.”
It would be interesting to hear how the “small government” Republicans and Conservative gun owners feel about the existence of a database of gun owners.
If the Democrats created a gun owner database, the Right would have a complete meltdown. I don’t doubt that there would be threats to use “the 2nd amendment” against Democrats, a phrase we heard from Kari Lake and other Republican politicians in the past.
Progressives are against the creation of any type of database that contains information about American citizens. This database was probably used to send out campaign material to voters. Republican gun owners were recipients of pro-gun campaign mailers sent by the Trump campaign in 2016.
If I were a Republican and a gun owner, I would be doing what I could to get my name out of that database.
