Rethinking Gun Violence

Sometimes an idea comes around to solve a hard problem that is so stunningly simple you wonder why no one had thought of it before. And once it sticks in your mind, it is impossible to unthink it, as it rearranges your world. 

This is the effect of the argument that Jens Ludwig, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, makes in “Unforgiving Places.” Ludwig has been studying gun violence for 30 years as both a researcher and a doer. He founded the University of Chicago Crime Lab as a place where ideas — often sourced from neighborhood groups — could be tested with a rigor that is usually reserved for medical science. It has become a wellspring of important ideas to reduce gun violence, many of which have their roots in behavioral science.

In his new book, Ludwig argues that both the “lock ’em up” and the “solve poverty” approaches have missed the central driver of most gun violence: the seemingly uncontrollable impulse of the moment. This insight has important implications for a country that has a long track record of failure when it comes to preventing violence. (Our rates of mortality from violence remain where they were in the 1900s even as advances in science have radically reduced mortality from disease.)

Ludwig shows how changing individual behavior is in fact possible — and that these changes can result in dramatic declines in gun violence. His erudite but engaging book provides a ray of hope about this perniciously American, confoundingly intractable and tragically damaging problem.

Vital City sat down with Ludwig last month. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Vital City: Reading your book, I’m just struck by its incredible richness. It does so many things at once: It’s social history. It’s an intellectual history. It’s a history of government. Most importantly, it weaves all that together to show a new way of thinking about addressing gun violence. Could we start with you explaining how you think our current approach to dealing with gun violence has put us on the wrong foot?

Jens Ludwig: I wrote the book largely because after working on this problem for 30 years, I had an epiphany: much of what we think we know about gun violence might be wrong or incomplete. This might explain our lack of progress.

So, if you look at survey data, it shows that most Americans think about what causes gun violence in one of two ways. Those right-of-center often see it as a problem of incorrigibly bad people who are unafraid of whatever the criminal justice system is going to do to them. If that’s your view, the only thing to do about the problem is have ever harsher penalties.

But those left-of-center view gun violence as being caused by economically desperate people doing whatever it takes to feed their families. This leads to the belief that the only way to solve this problem is in improving the alternatives to crime — better jobs, a stronger social safety net.

We’ve toggled between either carrots or sticks being the two policy levers for over the last hundred years. The thing that these carrot and stick ways of thinking have in common is that they both assume that before anyone pulls a trigger, they are actually thinking in deliberate, premeditated ways about what the consequences of their actions would be. If this is the underlying assumption, then incentives, positive or negative, naturally seem like the solution.

But I think that, for starters, this misses what the gun violence problem in America actually is. When you actually look at the data, the overwhelming majority of shootings in America are arguments. They start with words, they end in tragedy because someone’s got a gun. This is not the sort of violence that incentives are going to solve.

VC: In some ways, your approach is that of the ultimate realist: You can’t solve poverty, or solve it quickly enough to stop gun violence. And you can’t change the number of guns in circulation — 400 million guns. But you say: We can change behavior. To me, that seems like the hardest thing of all.

JL: Yeah. Before I get to that, I would start with two things I hope readers take from the book: a new understanding of the problem, and at least as important, that people feel even a sliver of optimism about a problem that I think lots of people have essentially given up on. And I think the reason people have given up is that we have 400 million guns in a country of 330 million people, and they aren’t going anywhere. The odds we get the kind of UK-style gun laws that you’d need to dramatically make a difference in gun availability to high-risk people, doesn’t look like that’s happening anytime soon.

The main problem with guns in America is that they make violent crime deadlier: Gun Violence equals Guns plus Violence. If we can’t get rid of the guns, maybe we can reduce the violence. That gives us a second path. And New York City showed this was possible — a 90% drop in murders from 1991 to 2019. That wasn’t due to removing all the guns; it was a behavior change.

VC: You show the historical trend lines — the rise and fall of gun violence — but note we might be hitting a floor. Is behavior change the key to breaking through this floor? That seems pretty daunting.

JL: “Behavior change” sounds really difficult. Yes, it’s a “you’ll have to carry me out in a pine box before I give up coffee” kind of thing. But what I’ve learned from working on this problem for 30 years is that a huge share of shootings are mistakes made in difficult situations — actions people later regret. Instead of “behavior change,” think about it as helping people avoid mistakes they themselves would regret, made under pressure. That feels more achievable.

I think some of the most important breakthroughs in the last part of the 20th century were the things we learned from behavioral economics and science that show how much differently our brains work than we intuitively understand. Our minds employ two types of thinking, but we’re typically only aware of one. We recognize “thinking” as the deliberate, logical voice in our head — weighing pros and cons. This is System 2 thinking: slow, often rational, but also mentally taxing. Think about how drained you feel after 15 minutes of a tough crossword puzzle. You’re like, “I need to take the rest of the day off.”

Because System 2 is so effortful, our minds evolved a second, parallel type of thinking: System 1. This is fast, automatic, low-effort thinking that operates below consciousness, handling routine situations. When you see a word, you read it automatically. You don’t deliberately think: oh, here’s a word, should I actually read it?

Danny Kahneman, in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” labels slow, effortful thinking System 2 and fast, automatic thinking System 1. What my book is arguing is that we’ve largely treated gun violence as a System 2 problem — a deliberate weighing of consequences — when it’s far more influenced by System 1 than we’ve appreciated. And all our policies and incentives are designed to address the slow thinking, rational part of the brain.

So it’s no wonder that the murder rate today in America is almost exactly the same as it was in 1900, right? — we’ve misunderstood the problem and applied the wrong levers.

It’s crucial to recognize this tendency is universal. Poker players talk about “going on tilt” — playing emotionally rather than rationally (that is, System 1 rather than System 2) when frustrated. The term comes from pinball machines flashing “TILT” if jostled. Experienced poker players learn to recognize their tilt triggers, what tilt feels like, and how to recover quickly. They benefit from a feedback loop — trial and error over many hands — an opportunity most of us lack in high-stakes real-world situations.

VC: This connects to your point that it’s not just about “bad people”. How our brains react and the decisions we make are heavily influenced by our situations. Living in a neighborhood with constant gunfire taxes mental bandwidth differently than a peaceful environment. Your reaction to conflict could be vastly different depending on the context.

JL: Exactly. If you think about the problem as mistakes made in difficult situations, I think one way to think about what’s going on, is that there are some situations that make it much more likely that you’ll make a mistake, go on tilt. And in some situations and some neighborhoods, the consequences of those mistakes are much more severe.

The 20th-century debate often centered on whether behavior is driven by inherent traits versus situational factors. Is it the person or the situation? My book argues that the left has been right to focus on the importance of situations. But the tendency to focus on really hard-to-change macro issues like poverty and segregation has led us to overlook other aspects of people’s social environments that matter enormously and are much easier to change.

To see that big root causes don’t capture all the situational factors that matter for gun violence, you just have to look at two adjacent neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side: Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore. They share the same demographics and the same level of poverty (and, for that matter, the same justice system and gun laws), yet the shooting rate per capita is twice as high in Greater Grand Crossing.

So what are these under-appreciated, feasible-to-modify aspects of the social environment? Thinking about gun violence as “mistakes made in difficult situations” points us in the right direction. Some situations increase the likelihood of making a mistake (engaging System 1 inappropriately), while others, often in the same neighborhoods, make the consequences of those mistakes far more severe. These things are correlated with big “root causes” but they’re not exactly the same thing.

Why might people be more likely to make mistakes in some neighborhoods than others? Because there are more stressors there. My friends Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, in their wonderful book “Scarcity,” show how stressors deplete mental bandwidth in ways that make people less reliant on the mentally taxing System 2 type of slow thinking and more reliant on the lower-effort System 1 fast thinking.

And you can see in the data that there are more stressors of all sorts in Greater Grand Crossing than in South Shore, ranging from more premature mortality — for example, COVID hit harder there — meaning more residents are grieving and traumatized, to more physical disorder — graffiti, trash, vacant lots — things Vital City focuses on.

Why might the consequences of these mistakes be more severe in some neighborhoods than others? Because of what Jane Jacobs, the giant of urban planning, called “eyes on the street” and what sociologists “collective efficacy” — the willingness of community members to intervene informally. This second factor, the presence of informal social control, also varies dramatically between neighborhoods. South Shore benefits from the accident of history of sitting right next to the crown jewel of Chicago – Lake Michigan — and so has lots more commercial development mixed in among its houses and apartment buildings, which serve the function of drawing people out into public to go to the store or local restaurant — to create, in other words, more eyes on the street. That’s notably less true in Greater Grand Crossing, which has more vacant lots, lower population density and less commercial activity, and so has fewer people around to step in and interrupt potentially violent events before they turn deadly.

VC: Your examples are pretty vivid. Living where a loud bang is likely gunfire, not a backfire, puts you constantly on edge. You might carry a gun for self-preservation, making an impulsive, defensive reaction more likely if you feel threatened — a reaction you might not have in a less stressful environment. We all experience stress and react impulsively sometimes, like in traffic, but the stakes are usually much lower.

JL: Exactly. And the stakes differ partly due to the varying prevalence of gangs, guns and drugs across neighborhoods. But another critical factor is the social environment’s capacity to cushion mistakes. This is something that happens to all of us. Here’s one example. I’ve lived in Hyde Park, the University of Chicago neighborhood, for 18 years. Every Wednesday morning, I walk my dog, Aiko, while on a conference call with the senior leadership team of my research center, the University of Chicago Crime Lab. One morning, a neighbor’s off-leash dog charged towards me, baring its teeth, barking and snarling.

My deliberate self would’ve thought: what’s the worst thing that’s going to happen here? My dog is 65 pounds — a lover, not a fighter. It’s very possible she could’ve taken care of herself. Or I could’ve just lifted her up. Worst-case scenario is maybe she gets bitten and I take her to the vet. That’s not the end of the world. The thing that would be really bad is for me to lose my mind in front of another University of Chicago faculty member in front of everyone who lives in my neighborhood. I wasn’t planning on moving, and they weren’t planning on moving, and so rational Jens would’ve behaved one way.

But actual Jens totally went on tilt and used every four-letter word I could think of. At high volume in front of everyone in the neighborhood and with the senior leadership of my center on the phone.

This is System 1 at work, and making mistakes. I instantly assumed malicious intent (”How could this jerk let his dog off leash?”) when it was likely an accident. My neighbor likely felt unfairly attacked for an honest mistake. We both felt justified, a common feature in violent interactions.

What de-escalated it wasn’t our rationality, but a University of Chicago security guard who came by and said, “You guys alright, or do you need me to call the police?” That broke it up then and there.

About 60 years ago, Jane Jacobs coined a term for that in her wonderful book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” which is “eyes on the street.”

Then 30 years ago, Rob Sampson, Steve Raudenbush and Tony Earls had a related term, “collective efficacy,” the willingness of people to step in and break things up. The presence of eyes on the street or whatever you want to call it helps keep a lid on the social environment that varies across neighborhoods. Luckily, we were in Hyde Park, nobody had a gun and there was someone around to step in and deescalate it. In Greater Grand Crossing, for example, there are way more vacant lots, way fewer people walking around, so who’s available to step in and deescalate?

VC: One feature of the deescalation is the interruption of system one thinking, right? That officer asking you “everything okay here?” forces you to back off, pause and let System 2 re-engage: “I have to see this guy again; maybe this isn’t so serious; maybe I was wrong.”

JL: Yeah, exactly. Novelty and high stakes tend to activate System 2. In the moment, I was catastrophizing about my dog — once System 1 concluded literally nothing is worse than having my dog attacked, then screaming at this guy in front of my work colleagues and the whole neighborhood seemed (mistakenly) less bad. The security guard’s question was like a bucket of cold water: Wake up System 2, you do not want the police department to come into this.

VC: In more unforgiving environments, without that intervention, the escalation continues. And the catastrophizing — “There’s nothing worse than looking like a coward in front of my friends” — can lead you to doing something that will affect the rest of your life.

JL: Exactly. And one thing I would add is that those system 1responses aren’t always mistakes. We have them because they make sense in neighborhoods where, for example, social control has broken down, where there aren’t many storekeepers, or lots of adults around or whatever. Kids learn that it is really important to develop reputations as not being easy victims. Because if someone challenges you today for your lunch money and you just hand it over, tomorrow they’re coming back for your jacket, the day after for your phone. You learn to push back — not necessarily in a way that’s proportional — because it’s not retaliation for what just happened, it’s forward-looking. I’m signaling, “don’t mess with me, I’m not an easy victim.”

VC: So, we’ve been talking a little bit theoretically. But you, the Crime Lab and others have translated these ideas into concrete interventions. Programs like Becoming a Man (BAM) and Choose to Change show significant results — reductions in violence involvement and arrests. These programs seem animated by the same core behavioral ideas. You suggest behavioral economics could provide a “map for the end to gun violence nationwide.” What does this map look like? How do we implement it?

JL: At a high level, the map involves pivoting away from an exclusive focus on changing incentives towards recognizing the problem of gun violence as one of people making mistakes in difficult, unforgiving situations. Concretely, this takes two forms. One is, how do we help people be less likely to make mistakes (go on tilt) in high-stakes situations? And then how do we reduce the chances that going on tilt leads to disaster?

Think about the poker analogy again. Players learn through constant feedback — trial and error over many hands. Losing $5,000 after going on tilt is painful but not catastrophic, and it provides a valuable lesson. So losing $5,000 isn’t great, but it’s not the end of the world. But most people never get that feedback, especially for high-stakes decisions.

Newer, behavioral economics-informed social programs aim to provide this practice. Traditional programs, assuming poverty drives violence, focus on job training, income support and things like that. While addressing poverty is vital for its own sake, if the goal is specifically ending gun violence, we also need programs that directly help people recognize their triggers, understand what being “on tilt” feels like and learn strategies to manage it — much like poker players do. Programs like Becoming a Man, Choose to Change and READI Chicago give participants practice in simulated high-pressure situations, allowing them to recognize, anticipate and adjust their responses. The other key is that they’re engaging, letting people practice, not just be talked at — they’re “show, don’t tell” programs.

The challenge is scaling these interventions. One way to do so is to leverage existing social systems — schools and detention facilities — which currently contain vast amounts of low-value time. Think about required health education classes. For years, we teach teens things they often already know or ignore, like eating broccoli or where babies come from.

Yet, the biggest health risks for teens are gun violence (especially among minority teens), suicide, drug overdose and car accidents. These behavioral economics programs typically require only 15-20 hours total. Why not repurpose a small fraction of that time in classes  that no one wants to go to — using the same teachers, students and buildings — to deliver content proven to reduce violence and improve adolescent health outcomes? We should implement this in schools and similarly integrate it into programming within jails and juvenile detention centers, replacing unproductive time.

VC: I love that idea because it drips these ideas into the drinking water in a wholesale way that seems really important. As you were talking, it made me think that, if you pull the camera back, there’s a kind of institutional version of System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 1 is the institutional and hardwired response to call the police. And police can do a lot of things but not necessarily everything. And then there’s societal system 2 thinking, which might be lighting dark places, cleaning up abandoned buildings. I’m wondering, does the larger social structure shift the dominant paradigms — “bad people” requiring punishment or “root causes” being the only solution — that have stalled us? This behavioral economics framework seems uniquely positioned to navigate the typical left-right divides. How does it become more broadly accepted?

JL: Firstly, I hope the book helps by providing the underlying coherent idea that connects seemingly disparate, evidence-based interventions like community violence interruption, cleaning vacant lots, and behavioral economics-style programs. Imagine trying to understand the response to the COVID pandemic without a unifying theory, like the germ theory for disease: masking, social distancing, vaccines — it just looks like a random laundry list. This book tries to provide that consilience, showing how different approaches are actually facets of the same underlying principle. Hopefully, this helps people see a unified third way, beyond just bad people or bad conditions.

Secondly, we need to acknowledge our collective track record of failure. If we were succeeding, we wouldn’t need new ideas. But the U.S. murder rate hasn’t fundamentally changed in over a century, unlike almost every other major cause of death, which all have plummeted. We clearly haven’t mastered this. Cities compete for residents and businesses, creating a dynamic for change. Look at Los Angeles and New York: In 1991, their murder rates were nearly identical to Chicago’s. Since then, L.A.’s rate dropped significantly, and New York’s plummeted by almost 90%. This prompts other cities, like Chicago, to ask what they did differently. While perhaps not always intentional, many strategies employed by L.A. and New York align with this behavioral perspective. Hopefully, presenting a coherent framework, combined with inter-city competition, can create a flywheel effect, pushing cities to adopt more effective, evidence-based approaches.

VC: You talk in the book about an "FDA for public policy" that doesn’t exist. And in a way, you're playing that role — showing what the evidence says works.

JL: Yes. The reason we don’t have an FDA for policy is because we see these as political fights, not technical challenges. The right says gun violence equals bad people. The left says gun violence equals bad conditions. The real issue is complex and hasn’t been solved because we haven’t used data well.

That’s the promise of evidence-based policy. Social problems persist because they’re complicated, not because one side is evil. And we're on the steep part of the learning curve.

VC: That’s a hopeful note, especially now. These ideas sidestep the left-right binary. Some last reflections?

JL: Yes. One aha moment was reading the history. James Q. Wilson, a conservative icon, architect of what became mass incarceration, was originally open to crime prevention. But in the 1970s, the prevailing view was that prevention didn’t work. So he pivoted to punishment, pragmatically.

Now, we have gold-standard evidence — randomized trials — showing prevention works. My hope is that people across the political spectrum, who can all see that prevention is clearly the first-best way to deal with this terrible problem, can get on board with this agenda once they’re really convinced that gun violence is more preventable than we’ve long thought. From there we can really change things.

VC: That’s a hopeful and a pragmatic note. Not about right or wrong, but about what works. Thanks so much, Jens.

JL: Thank you.