Jens Ludwig, "Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network – On the Cusp
Host: Alfred Marcus
Guest: Jens Ludwig, Professor at University of Chicago, Director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab
Book Discussed: Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Release Date: February 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Jens Ludwig’s new book, which challenges long-standing narratives on American gun violence. Ludwig offers a behavioral economics lens—drawing heavily on Daniel Kahneman's System 1/System 2 thinking—to argue that automatic, situational responses (not just "bad people" or "desperate circumstances") drive much of American gun violence. The conversation ranges from national statistics and local examples in Chicago to policy implications and intervention strategies.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Paradox of Falling Homicide Rates and Persistent "Unforgiving Places"

• Stats: U.S. homicide rates dropped 17-21% from 2024 to 2025, possibly hitting the lowest point in a century ([01:07]).
• Ludwig’s Perspective: Despite declines, gun violence remains a severe problem in certain American neighborhoods.
  • “It’s like a 600-pound man losing 100 pounds. You’d still say there’s a huge health problem” ([04:23]).
• International Comparison: U.S. homicide rate is about 5 per 100,000; Chicago is 15, Baltimore/Detroit 40, Australia 1, Japan 0.2 ([03:25]).
  • Quote: “What is normal life in America would be an unimaginable public safety emergency [in Australia or Japan].” – Jens Ludwig ([04:00])

2. Gun Laws, Availability, and Variability

• Research: Higher gun ownership correlates with higher murder rates, but availability alone can't explain intra-city differences ([06:20]).
• Neighborhood Example: Chicago's South Shore vs. Greater Grand Crossing—same access to trafficked guns, vastly different violence rates ([07:26]).
  • Quote: “Gun violence equals guns plus violence … willingness to use guns independently matters” ([07:50]).
• Gun control matters, but behavioral and contextual factors are equally crucial.

3. Self-Defense and Deterrence

• Acknowledgment: Guns are sometimes used defensively.
• Net Effect: The costs outweigh benefits; “on net when you have more guns, the murder rate rises” ([10:20]).

4. Immigration and Crime

• Findings: Immigrants commit less crime on average than native-born Americans ([10:42]).

5. Challenging Conventional Wisdom

• Two Standard Narratives:
  • “Bad people” needing harsher punishment.
  • “Desperate people” needing better opportunities.
• Why These Fall Short:
  • Century-long lack of progress despite oscillating between these approaches.
  • Both assume rational, premeditated violence, which doesn't match most cases ([12:30],[14:00]).
  • Quote: “The overwhelming majority of shootings in America are arguments that go sideways and end in tragedy because someone’s got a gun” ([15:00]).

6. Detection, Deterrence, and Rationality

• Low Arrest Rates: ~50% of murderers are arrested; only 5-10% for nonfatal shootings ([15:44]).
• Behavioral Nuance: Many shootings are not the result of rational, calculated decisions, undermining strict deterrence models ([17:00]).

7. Behavioral Economics: Kahneman’s System 1 & System 2

• Explanation: System 2 = deliberate, taxing reasoning; System 1 = fast, automatic, mostly unconscious ([17:58]).
  • Most daily decisions rely on System 1; it’s efficient but prone to error in the wrong context.
• Shooting Incidents: Often, it’s System 1-driven “crimes of passion” rather than calculated acts ([22:06]).
  • Quote: “It is largely a problem of normal people making a mistake in a very difficult 10-minute window that leads to tragedy because someone’s got a gun” ([22:50]).
• Implications: Focus on changing automatic responses through interventions.

8. Unlearning Harmful Behaviors: Real-World Interventions

• Juvenile Detention Example: Training guards to deliver behavioral science programming reduces crime ([23:57], [25:00]).
  • Concept: Teach kids about egocentric construal (believing everything is about them), which fuels escalation.
• Scalable and Cheap: Such interventions can be rolled out at nearly no cost in jails, detention centers, even schools ([26:00]).

9. Neighborhood Context (“Eyes on the Street”)

• Beyond Poverty: Vibrancy (businesses, foot traffic) correlates with less violence, per Jane Jacobs’ theory ([28:51]).
  • Comparisons: South Shore (more businesses, less violence) vs. Greater Grand Crossing ([30:00]).
• Local Business as Crime Prevention: Immigrant-run small businesses contribute to safety by increasing “eyes on the street” ([31:57], [34:09]).
  • Quote: “Businesses … create this huge positive externality … helping greatly address the biggest part of the crime problem in American cities, which is gun violence” ([34:09]).

10. Community Violence Intervention (CVI) and Policing

• Police: Crucial for immediate de-escalation but stretched thin, often lack time/skills for mediation ([36:14]).
• CVI: Outreach workers with local credibility mediate long-term conflicts and help in ways police cannot ([39:00]).
• Complementary Roles: Both police and CVI are needed, not substitutes. Cooperation is key ([42:05]).
• Training: University of Chicago Crime Lab runs “Leadership Academies” for both groups to promote collaboration ([43:09],[43:55]).

11. Upstream and Downstream Causality

• Violence as a Cause of Poverty: Gun violence speeds depopulation and makes economic development hard ([47:44]).
  • Steve Levitt’s Research: “Every murder that happens in a city reduces the city’s population by 70 people” ([48:00]).
• Policy Outlook: Controlling violence is foundational for broader urban progress.

12. Policy Recommendations (If Ludwig Were ‘Benevolent Dictator’) ([51:03])

• Three Focus Areas:
  1. Behavioral Training: Infuse behavioral science programming in detention centers and schools—low cost, scalable.
  2. Built Environment: Invest in cleaning vacant lots, pocket parks, better lighting, and supporting new businesses for vibrancy—cites 30% violence reduction in Philadelphia ([52:30]).
  3. Targeted Data Use: Use analytics to pinpoint hotspots and times of risk, maximizing effectiveness with existing resources ([53:30]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “What is normal life in America would be an unimaginable public safety emergency [in Australia or Japan].” – Jens Ludwig ([04:00])
• “Gun violence equals guns plus violence … willingness to use guns independently matters.” ([07:50])
• “The overwhelming majority of shootings in America are arguments that go sideways and end in tragedy because someone’s got a gun.” ([15:00])
• “It is largely a problem of normal people making a mistake in a very difficult 10-minute window that leads to tragedy because someone’s got a gun.” ([22:50])
• “Businesses aren’t just for creating jobs … but it really does create this huge positive externality … helping greatly address the biggest part of the crime problem in American cities, which is gun violence.” ([34:09])
• “These two capacities, police and community violence intervention, really need to be viewed as compliments, not substitutes.” ([42:25])
• “Every murder that happens in a city reduces the city’s population by 70 people.” – Steve Levitt (as quoted by Ludwig, [48:00])
• “If your goal is to solve problems, you start from the problem and look at the data honestly and work back from there, rather than start from my political ideology.” ([59:28])

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Important Timestamps

• [02:45] – U.S. homicide rates and international comparison
• [06:20] – Research on gun laws and intra-city violence differences
• [11:58] – Conventional wisdom: bad people vs. tragic circumstances
• [17:58] – Kahneman’s System 1/System 2 explanation
• [22:06] – “Crimes of passion” and the 10-minute window
• [23:57] – Juvenile detention center intervention example
• [28:45] – Neighborhood vibrancy: Greater Grand Crossing vs. South Shore
• [34:09] – Immigrants and commercial vibrancy
• [36:14] – Role of police vs. community violence intervention
• [51:03] – Ludwig’s top three policy recommendations
• [53:30] – Data-driven hotspot policing
• [59:28] – “Pragmatism” versus ideology in problem-solving

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Conclusion

Jens Ludwig argues that understanding American gun violence requires moving beyond moralizing and economic narratives to grasp the automatic, situational thinking that triggers shootings. Solutions must fuse behavioral science, environmental redesign, and pragmatic policy—working with limited resources—to interrupt the System 1 patterns that so often turn arguments into tragedies. Interventions—from training in detention centers and schools to supporting businesses and leveraging analytics—can make lasting change, but require collaboration, realism, and a clear-eyed look at data, not dogma.

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For more:

• Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (U Chicago Press, 2025)
• University of Chicago Crime Lab
• Host contact: [e-mail]

Transcript

[A]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[B]

Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Alfred Marcus, and this is on the Cusp, where we explore how strategy, ethics and governance intersect in shaping institutions and social change. Today I'm speaking with Jens Ludwig, a leading scholar of crime and public policy at the University of Chicago and director of the University of Chicago Crime Labor. His new book, Unforgiving the Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, offers a behavioral economics account of why gun violence in the United States is so concentrated in particular neighborhoods and social contexts. Ludwig argues that our usual stories about bad people who need harsher punishment or desperate people who who need more opportunity miss how automatic situational thinking drives many shootings. So let me begin with a current development. Recent analysis, a New York Times report based on Counsel on Criminal justice data show that homicides fell roughly 17 to 21% from 2024 to 2025, with some experts suggesting US murder rate may now be at or near its lowest level in more than a century. How do you hold these two facts together? The good news of falling homicide rates and the stubborn reality of unforgiving places.

[C]

Wait. Thanks for the question. Thanks again for having me. It's really terrific to be here. I think what I would say is the way to reconcile those two facts is to appreciate how unforgiving the unforgiving places really are in the United States. And so even with these big declines that we've been seeing in recent years how terrible this problem of American gun violence is. So let me just give you two benchmarks to help see that. If you look at mortality data in the United States, like life expectancy since 1900 has basically doubled. Almost. Death rates per capita of almost every leading cause have plummeted with just two exceptions. One is cancer and the other is homicide. The homicide rate today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1900. And so we have unlike most leading causes of death, this is a problem that we've made no real long term progress on, despite the short term ups and downs that we tend to see over time. The second kind of benchmark that I would use for this is international comparisons. You know, I was the murder rate in the United States today is, let's call it, roughly speaking, 5 per 100,000. In my home city of Chicago, it's 15 per 100,000. If you go to a place like Baltimore or Detroit, it'll be something like 40 per 100,000 this August for work. I was in Australia, where their murder rate is 1 per 100,000. And then I went to Japan where their murder rate is 0.2 per 100,000. I was giving a talk to government officials and I mentioned the Chicago homicide rate and people completely lost. They were sure that I must be wrong about the data. Right. Like, what is normal life in America would be an unimaginable public safety emergency there. And so I have a police chief friend of mine, the way he put it was what we're seeing in these recent years is almost like a 600 pound man losing 100 pounds. If you're that person's doctor, you would say, like, we still have a huge health problem here that we need to worry about.

[B]

People. Does that actually constitute, let's say in Chicago or Detroit, who actually are killed by. Who affected by homicides in a year?

[C]

Yeah. You know, in Chicago, looking out over recent years, this would be somewhere between, call it 300 and 500 people murdered every year and thousands and thousands of people shot on top of that. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of people who live in neighborhoods where shootings are a regularity. You know, I for 18 years lived in Hyde park when the weather's nice. You know, the two weeks a year we have nice weather in Chicago. We would sleep with the windows open all the time and almost every night you would hear gunfire in the distance. Right. And what it's like to try and raise your family in an environment in which that is a local occurrence. It's just hard for people who are not exposed to that to appreciate the effects of that.

[B]

It's like living in Beirut during their civil war. So I would suspect, I think the rate in New York is about 350, the number per year. Right now it's about 350. And it's way down in New York, which is, which is quite amazing. How, how much does gun. What our gun laws have to do with this?

[C]

Yeah, you know, I think, you know, I, I've been one of the people who, along with my friend and Duke professor Phil Cook, we've done some of the research that's shown that in places that have higher rates of gun ownership on net, the, the murder rate is higher. And, you know, so guns might deter crime, but guns also make crime more deadly when it does happen. And so on net, it seems like the effect of guns to make crime more deadly tends to dominate. But with that said, there is still a huge amount of variability in gun violence rates that gun availability can't explain. You know, so, for instance, you know, here on the south side of Chicago, just about a mile south of where I am here on the University of Chicago campus, in my office, there are two neighborhoods, South Shore and Greater Grand Crossing, that are right across the street from one another. The rate of gun violence per capita is fully twice as high in Greater Grand Crossing as it is in South Shore. And yet it's just as easy to traffic guns in from Indiana to South Shore as it is to Greater Grand Crossing. That's to say, like the way I've come to think about it is gun violence equals guns plus violence. So gun availability matters a lot. But you can see in this example of these two neighborhoods even holding gun availability constant, there are huge differences in gun violence. And that tells you that the willingness of people to use guns to hurt one another independently matters. And that's good news, because I think if you just look at Washington, D.C. it seems unlikely that there will be big changes in federal gun laws anytime soon. If you thought the only solution were gun control, you would think we have no way out of this. But the fact that violent behavior independently matters suggests a second type of thing that we can try and fix with public policy to help save lives.

[B]

I was going to get to those two neighborhoods later. Can you explain the differences between them and what explains the differences between their, their homicide rates?

[C]

Yeah, I'm, I'm happy to. I'm happy to defer that later. Sorry, but let me just mention them now to, to tee up. The fact that, you know, gun control itself is important but far from the whole story and the fact that there's so much more going on is in many ways part of the motivation for the book. If we can understand that, then we could start making more progress on the problem.

[B]

Is there anything to the argument that people having guns deters crime or saves people?

[C]

Well, what we know, like what is for sure true, what is for sure true is that there are people in the United States every year who use guns to defend themselves against criminal attacks. Right. It's very hard to know exactly what that number is. It's like very hard to measure that with any accuracy. But we know for sure that number's not zero. Right. And we don't know what the, it's very hard to measure whatever the deterrent effect is on that, the problem. So. But this is an argument, you know, you're also an economist by training, you know, this is an argument about there's a difference between a gross benefit and a net benefit. Right? So even if lots of people having guns helps people use guns defensively sometimes, suppose that it does also generate some deterrent effect. There are also big costs to that as well, Right. It makes it easier for criminals to get guns when there are just more guns around and normal people lose their minds. This is part of the thesis of the book. Even, you know, quote, normal people lose their minds in the wrong moment. And if you have lots of people with guns, that makes those events more deadly. And so on net, the net effect like both of these things can be true. Guns could have a deterrent effect. Guns could be used in self defense. But it is also the true that on net when you have more guns, the murder rate rises.

[B]

Let me ask one other question. What about immigrants? What does the data suggest on immigrant violence or even more specifically undocumented or unauthorized immigrants?

[C]

Yeah, so the, the best data that, you know, I should add a caveat up front is that I was born in Germany. So you know, that's my like conflict of interest disclosure right up right up front here. But with that said, I think all of the, I don't know if the data distinguishes between illegal and legal immigrants. I think it's hard to get someone to admit on a survey that they're an illegal immigrant. But what you can see in the data pretty clearly is that immigrants tend to engage in crime on average at lower rates than native born Americans.

[B]

That's what I've seen. I saw a Cato Institute study that suggested that the crime rate among immigrants is far lower than among Native Americans. And that is not a finding I think Cato Institute wanted to come up with given its political point of view.

[C]

I mean, it's not uniform. I mean obviously there are immigrants who do engage in crime in the same way that there are native born people. But on average immigrants are not this like super high risk group compared to native born Americans.

[B]

Let's get back to the conventional wisdoms of left and right bad people versus tragic circumstances. What convinced you that these frameworks are inadequate?

[C]

Yeah, you know, let me, before I answer that, let me just remind people of what conventional wisdom has been about violent behavior in the United States for a hundred years. You know, I, for the book, I spent a lot of time looking at surveys of what people, what Americans think drives violent behavior. And you can see from the surveys that most people fall into one of two camps in what they believe. So one camp thinks that the problem of a violent crime is driven by morally bad people who are just not afraid of whatever the criminal justice system is going to do to them. And so that leads you to think that the only thing that you can do to prevent violence is by threatening people with ever bigger criminal justice sticks. Most Americans who don't believe that believe a different conventional wisdom which is that violent behavior is all driven by economic desperation, desperate people who are looking to feed themselves and their families. And that leads you to think that the only thing that you can do is steer people away, entice people away from crime with more lucrative job opportunities and more generous social safety net, that sort of thing. And I think there are maybe two reasons that I've become convinced that that is some combination of not the right way to think about it or at the very least not a complete explanation for what's going on. And the first thing that convinced me of that is just the lack of long term progress on this problem that I mentioned. We've basically been ping ponging back and forth between those two conventional wisdoms for at least 100 years. Look at what the Republican candidate for president in 1930 was saying. They were we need harsher criminal justice system. Look at what FDR was saying in the 1930s. He was like, we need to do more to address root causes. We've been going back and forth between those two. We spent a lot of money over the last hundred years addressing those two sorts of explanations and it's just not led to any long term progress as I mentioned. So it's just not empirically it's not led to an effective set of solutions. The second reason is, I think what convinced me is that both of those conventional wisdoms misunderstand what gun violence in America actually is. So if you think the solution is bigger, criminal justice sticks, or you think the solution is bigger, social policy carrots, both sides in these debates implicitly think that before anybody pulls a trigger, they're kind of rationally weighing the pros and cons of whatever is going to happen next. You, you are implicitly assuming that violent behavior, that gun violence is like premeditated, deliberate, some sort of rational weighing of pros and cons, that, that it's intentional and that the solution is to change incentives. And it's no wonder that people believe that, because when you look at what media covers, media disproportionately covers a certain type of shooting that fits that explanation. Gang wars over drug selling turf, somebody shot in a robbery for their phone or their wallet or their car keys or whatever it is. But when you actually look at the data on the ground, you can see that's not what gun violence actually is. The overwhelming majority of shootings in America are arguments that go sideways and end in a tragedy because someone's got a gun. And if you've ever been in one of those super heated moments, you realize that is not you at your most deliberate, rational benefit, cost calculating self. Right. And so we just need a different understanding of the problem if we're going to make more progress.

[B]

I think this is aside. How many people who commit violent crimes and murders, how many of them get away with it? Do we have any statistics on that?

[C]

Well, you know, in I can just. The statistics that I know best come from here in Chicago. And you know, one might, one might wonder whether the Chicago criminal justice system is necessarily the very best in the world. So take that as a, as a caveat. You know, I think the most recent statistics that I saw suggest that around half of murderers will be arrested and so some smaller share will then go on to be convicted and incarcerated. And if you look at non fatal shootings, and often the difference between a non fatal shooting and a murderer is literally just dumb luck. The victim is hit a few inches here versus there for non fatal shootings. The most recent statistics I've seen suggest it's on the order of like call it 5 to 10% of offenders and non fatal shootings wind up getting arrested. Again, smaller share wind up getting convicted and incarcerated.

[B]

So even like a Gary Becker cost benefit analysis, it just doesn't make sense because the deterrence is probably really not there. If somebody would look at the odds beforehand and think about it in those terms.

[C]

Yeah, well, I think that, that. I think that that's right. Like, I think a lot of these, you know, a lot of these shooting. You can see people engage in shootings on, like, crowded streets in the middle of the afternoon. Right. They're clearly not. Like, even in a city like Chicago, if you shoot someone in the middle of the afternoon with 50 other people on the street and city cameras everywhere, there's a reasonable chance that you will get caught and spend decades downstate in the Illinois Department of Corrections.

[B]

It's not premeditated murder, carefully planned and thought through to avoid any kind of detection. So that's the central contribution. You apply a behavioral economics perspective to this, The Kahneman System 1, System 2 framework into the study of crime. So could you briefly explain that to our listeners, System 1 and System 2, if they haven't read the famous book I love the Kahneman work. I just. It's so important.

[C]

Yeah. If any listener has not read Danny Kahneman's amazing book Thinking Fast and Slow, you definitely should. I think it really is. It's one of the most important books that I've ever read myself. And I think lots of people have that view. And I think, you know, it. It really summarizes one of the. I think one of the most important social science findings that we've had in the last half century, at least, which is that our minds. This is true for all of us. Our minds do not work the way we think they do. Right. Like, what we think of thinking is only a tiny part of what our minds are doing. You know, we think of thinking as the little voice in our head. And so it's like, do I really want to get the warranty on the new iPhone that I'm getting? And then I'm thinking that through. Right. That little voice in our head that to the extent to which we're ever rational, it comes from. And deliberate and weighing pros and cons, it comes from that little voice in our head. Psychologists call that the rational self, the deliberate self, the System two self, whatever.

[B]

You call it, I think even talked about that way back when.

[C]

And that type of thinking is very powerful, but it's very, very mentally taxing. My wife loves to do the New York Times crossword and Wordle and all these other things. And every morning she does this. But after 15 minutes, I can see she has to get up and get herself another cup of coffee and take a mental Break. That is evidence that your deliberate rational system to self is really, really mentally taxing. And because of that, all of our minds have developed to engage in a series of like automatic, below the level of consciousness, effortless, really fast kind of responses that help us navigate daily life in a way where we're not just mentally exhausted. We don't have to deliberately think about all of these things. Psychologists call that System one. And you know a lot. I think part of the argument of the book is like system one is super important. You could not navigate your daily life. You know, you're walking around campus here at the University of Chicago, you see someone with the University of Chicago sweatshirt. If you had to deliberately, with that little voice in your head, ask yourself every time, should I read the sweatshirt? Should I read the text on that person's sweatshirt? And that was true for every little thing. You'd just be wiped out. You couldn't function. So that's an example. You develop an automatic response to see text, read text. It's almost involuntary, right? And that normally works well for you. But I argue that a lot of the gun violence in the US is actually driven by System one. Automatic responses that might be normally helpful for you, but can lead to tragedy when there's a gun around.

[B]

Maybe that's learned. It's almost like the autonomic nervous system. Our hearts and our lungs just function without much thinking. It's probably a little bit higher than that. But often these reflexes, these automatic responses are learned, I guess too. Is that an element of it?

[C]

Yeah, it's for sure true that if you think about what System one is doing, System one is developing automatic responses that work for you usually in your daily life. And like that is the great power of System One. And so the types of responses that work for you to navigate daily life depend on your circumstances. And so the types of things that System one will learn will be very different in different sorts of environments.

[B]

So most violent crime in your view then, or at least a high percentage of it, is a result of System 1 thinking or these 10 minute windows of automatic responses where, which overwhelm the slower or more deliberative judgment. Can you talk a little bit about that then? Crimes of passion, right?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, I think, you know, I think the data show pretty clearly that most gun violence in America, they're not crimes of profit, they're crimes of passion. Recognizing that rage is one of the more powerful human passions that we have. You know, I think that the mindset shift that I hope the book instills you know, helps instill in people was really, you know, wonderfully crystallized for me. I was in the juvenile detention center here in Chicago, out on the west side of the city many years ago, and a staff member in there was saying, this is where the juvenile courts hold the juvenile arrestees who they think are at highest risk for violence. And one of the staff members there was saying to me, you know, 20% of the kids in here are psychopaths. If you let them out, they're going to hurt other people. We just have no choice but to incarcerate them. These are his words, not mine. And he says to me, you know, the other 80%, I always tell them, if I could give you back just 10 minutes of your life, none of you would be here. And I think that really is kind of the mindset shift that I hope the book sort of instills. It's not, you know, gun violence is not merely a problem of morally bad people unafraid of the criminal justice system. It's not just a problem of economic desperation. It is largely a problem of normal people making a mistake in a very difficult 10 minute window that leads to tragedy because someone's got a gun. And the good news is like what has seemed like an intractable, uniquely American. Uniquely American among the rich countries of the world, uniquely American problem turns out not to be intractable. Once you sort of see the problem for what it is, it turns out that there are a bunch of things that we can do to better prevent it.

[B]

Some of these automatic responses are learned, I would suppose, and maybe they can be unlearned. Is that also the case?

[C]

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, so one of the things that. The reason that I was in the juvenile detention center is we were working with the administrator of the detention center to basically train the guards in the center to deliver sort of a behavioral science informed program to the kids. In the afternoon, the kids go to school in the morning. In the afternoon, the kids would just sit around in the common room watching TV while the guard stood against the wall watching the kids watch tv. And so the administrator was like, surely we can do something that's more developmentally productive than tv. And so the administrator train the guards to deliver this sort of programming to kids to get them to recognize, like, common traps that their minds lead them into. I'll just give you a quick example. It's like, you know, one of the lessons from psychology is that each of us views the world as a one person play where we're the star of the show.

[B]

Right, right. So.

[C]

So psychology calls that egocentric construal. And it's often useful for us to think that everything is about us. I'm in my kitchen in the morning and my wife comes, you know, comes down out of bed to get her morning coffee and she's got a furious look on her face. It is helpful for me, usually it's very helpful for me for my default assumption to be, oh no, what did I do this time? Right. But you can see now imagine that I'm a 15 year old kid in a cafeteria and I think that everything in the world is. I am the sun around which the rest of the universe orbits. And a kid at another table makes a really terrible face, right? I'm going to be at risk for thinking that that has something to do with me and that then creates the risk that that escalates even if it has nothing to do with me. That's, you know, that's the upside and the downside of egocentric construal there. Me assuming my wife or the kid in the cafeteria, then that's over generalizing this normally useful system. One response and so in the detention center here in Chicago, the guy who was running it, this amazing guy named Earl Dunlap, trained the guards to deliver this sort of program to the kids. And you can see that pointing this sort of thing out to them and giving them practice in scenarios to really internalize it reduced their later crime involvement and violence involvement. Right. And the thing that I think is, so you're absolutely right that people can, can learn these things and unlearn these things. And the thing that I think is particularly exciting about the juvenile detention example is we can help people unlearn these things in ways that don't cost much money, which is important because every city in the country is facing big budget problems. The kids in detention facilities, the adults in jails and prisons, they are all at greatly elevated risk for, for gun violence involvement. We have guards, we have people in these detention facilities. We can train the guards to deliver this sort of thing at basically zero cost. This feels like a super easy win that, you know, I would want every city and state around the country to capitalize on.

[B]

Are they, are there other examples where it's being adopted?

[C]

This is one of the things, you know, since, since my book came out, this is I'm getting calls from cities and states all around the country. And this has been the things that I've been talking to lots of places around the US about doing and you know, the policy people around the country like, they see their budget problems even more starkly than we do as outside newspaper readers. And so, you know, you tell them, here's a thing that's got evidence behind it and it's free. They're like, free sounds really good to me. Sold. So people have been really, really interested in these ideas.

[B]

I think I've taught business ethics for a long period of time too. And. And I think what I'm trying to do is actually present scenarios or many cases to students so that they're a little bit more prepared and they have a memory of having encountered something similar in their mind. I think it's the same basic intent of what I was trying to do. Let's get back to these two neighborhoods, Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore. Very similar in race, poverty and segregation, but dramatically different in shooting rates. So what does this comparison teach us about the role of neighborhood and context in violent crime, which is somewhat different than what we've just been discussing?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I think that there has been.

[B]

A.

[C]

Tremendous amount of attention historically to the problem of neighborhood poverty and how that contributes to the violence problem. I think that we have. We have under attended to the issues around neighborhood vibrancy. Right. So if you think that, if you think that most shootings are arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone's got a gun, right. Then you know, one way that you can de. Escalate that confrontation is by having someone from the outside step in and defuse it. Right. So 60 years ago, you know, the great urban planner Jane Jacobs, she wrote a wonderful book called the Death and Life of Great American Cities. And she had been living on Hudson street in the West Village at the time. And she's looking around Manhattan saying, why is it that similarly poor neighborhoods can have such dramatically different rates of crime and violence, just like South Shore and Greater Grand Crossing? And Jane Jacobs hypothesis is that some neighborhoods just have lots more people out and about in public who are around and willing to step in to diffuse things when they start. She called that eyes upon the street. Since Jane Jacobs wrote that 60 whatever years ago, we've now had a bunch of really good social science studies that I think are very convincingly show, in my view, that Jane Jacobs turned out to be right. You know, when you have more businesses in a neighborhood, you have more foot traffic. Violence goes down. When you clean up vacant lots and turn them into. When you clean up vacant lots and turn them into little pocket parks, more people are out in public, violence goes down. And so, you know, I think in thinking about greater Grand Crossing and South Shore. The poverty rates are the same, but South Shore has the great historic advantage of being located next to what I think is the best part of Chicago, which is beautiful Lake Michigan. And so 100 years ago, when these neighborhoods were really developing, South Shore just developed a bunch more commercial activity. And so the neighborhoods are similarly poor, but there are just a lot more. There are a lot more stores and stuff for people to walk to and South Shore instead. And I think that is one important part of why the neighborhoods can be similarly poor, but so different with respect to their. Their violence rates.

[B]

I mean, I live currently essentially in the western part of the Bronx, and I don't know, I've only recently moved here, and I don't know the neighborhoods really well in the Bronx, but there has been this decline in homicides in New York. And I have driven through many of these neighborhoods and even walked in them, and many of them are very vibrant. It's not like upscale malls that you would find in some cities, but there's huge amounts of local businesses and people in the streets. And maybe that has something to do even in New York with the decline in the homicide rates. I'm just speculating now.

[C]

Yeah. And I think, you know, what's interesting about this is, again, you know, for the book, I spent a ridiculous amount of time looking at every survey about crime that I could get my hands on. And, like, when you ask city residents who do you think is responsible for keeping the city safe, you know, they will say things like, things that you would expect. The mayor, the police chief, the head of the public school system, the head of the court system, whatever. You know, one person that almost never shows up on any of these survey lists, like, never gets mentioned by any members of the public, is, like, the person who runs a local planning department. Right. And yet, like, we can see here in my hometown of Chicago, we can see nobody who has ever tried to open a small business in Chicago ever has said, boy, that turned out to be easier than I expected. Right. We have layers upon layers of red tape that make this just insanely difficult. There's, you know, just Google, how hard is it to open a small business in Chicago? And you'll see. And that includes people trying to open commercial establishments on the most economically disadvantaged south and west sides of the city.

[B]

Right.

[C]

So there's a big national conversation underway, as you know, around, like, the abundance agenda. Can we make government more of a helper rather than a hindrance to getting stuff done, including, like, making it easier to zone in all sorts of development. You know, I think there would be like huge returns to thinking about how to prioritize the abundance agenda in the most economically disadvantaged and crime afflicted neighborhoods in the country so that it is easier to fix things up, put in new stores and that sort of thing.

[B]

Ironically, businesses really contribute to crime reduction. It's not the main goal, but their existence in commercial areas and their creation commercial. And that also would suggest, I think, that immigrants play a big role because many of immigrants play. Are starting new businesses. They certainly.

[C]

Yeah, you know, if you, I, I don't know how much time you or your listeners ever spend in Chicago, but you know, next time you're in Chicago, take a cab or an Uber out to the Little Village neighborhood on the south southwest side of the city. And you know, it is not, it is very far from the most affluent neighborhood in, in Chicago. Right. But you drive down the main drag in Little Village and it is just like so commercially active. You, you can't believe it. Right. And just so many people out. And I think all of that has, you know, as an economist, I forgive me for using econ jargon, but I would say like the businesses aren't just great for creating jobs and providing people with food and places to go and whatever, but it really does create this huge positive externality, if I can use that term, like this unintended positive benefit of also helping greatly address the biggest part of the crime problem in American cities, which is gun violence.

[B]

Eyes on the street.

[C]

Exactly. Eyes on the street. Exactly what Jane Jacobs called eyes on the street.

[B]

Yeah, I know that part of Chicago. It's primarily Mexican community.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. And some of the best tacos that you will find in Chicago.

[B]

Maybe in the world.

[C]

Maybe in the world. Fair enough, fair enough.

[B]

A major strand of your work involves community violence intervention. These outreach workers who step into conflicts. I think they're actually trained to do this and lend their System 2 lens to someone else's system. One thinking, what does the evidence tell us about these programs and how they work alongside more traditional policing? And what does that imply for policing here in New York with Madame's election and, and I mean, that was true even in Minnesota. When I was living there, there was discussion about how many. A lot of police work involves essentially social work as opposed to actually policing, and that the police aren't really trained to do that.

[C]

Yeah, you know, I think so. The research center that I run here at the University of Chicago, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, you know, we started 18 years ago with, with the goal of trying to be sort of an R and D partner to local city government to try and figure out how to solve big problems like gun violence. And as part of that, I was like, if we're going to be helpful to the city, I just need to understand this problem better. And so I spent a bunch of time going around with the Chicago Police Department, and maybe let me answer your question in parts partly by talking about what the police do to help prevent gun violence. Right. I was trained as an economist, and then I'll bridge over to what community violence intervention groups do and how the two activities align. So I was trained as an economist back in the 1890s, when I went off to graduate school, there was no such thing as behavioral economics. And I was taught that the way the criminal justice system, including police, reduce crime, is through deterrence. But spending a bunch of time sitting in police cars here in Chicago, I think one of the things that I realized is the police do a lot more than that as well, including acting as eyes on the street in their own way and de escalating things. And so let me just tell you a quick story that illustrates this, and then I'll connect it to community violence intervention groups. So, you know, I'm in the back of a police car on some summer evening here on the south side of Chicago, and a call comes in of two big groups of people fighting in the middle of the street. And so lights on, sirens on, the cars race over there, you know, and the cops show up, they get out, they separate the two groups of people. Like, notice when you've got 10, 20, 30 people brawling in the middle. Like, one of the big things that I think was a surprise to me is violence is much more violent than you think it is. You know, like Google gas station fight. And like, you know, it is so much worse than the language does not do justice to how traumatic even something like a group fistfight at a gas station might be. So at that moment, the only people once fists are flying and there's a big group, the only people who can interrupt at that point is a bunch of big burly Chicago cops who are getting out of the car using every 4, 7, and 12 letter word they know and that sort of thing, right? So the cops are doing violence interruption there. And so then they get out, they break it up, they ask what happened. Turned out that teenage girl on this side of the street had been dating teenage boy on this side who lives on this side of the street. They break up somebody from teenage girl's House thought it was a good idea to walk across the street, walk into the teenage boy's house and punch him in the face in front of all of his friends and relatives. And then it's on, right? Just a huge brawl in the middle of the street. And so the cops hear the story and then they say, I'll leave out all the profanity, but you can sort of imagine you can edit this in yourself. And the cops say, basically, everybody go back in your house. If we have to come back, all y' all are going to jail. And then we get in the car, you know, I'm sitting in the back, I'm doing my best to disguise. I'm in my baseball cap and my jeans and, and the Kevlar vest they make me work and make me wear. I turn to the sergeant in the front seat, I say, do you think that, do you think we're done here? Have you guys diffused this? He said, oh, absolutely not. There's going to be more trouble here tonight for sure. And I said, now this is getting to answering your question. And I said, oh, then why are we leaving? And he said, are you listening to the radio? He was like, on a Saturday? And it is true on a Saturday night on the south side of Chicago, if you're in one of these neighborhoods where gun violence is really common, like, it is literally true that you can go through stretches where it's like every 15 minutes it's a man with a gun call or a shots fired call. Like they're just lights and sirens called the call to call the call. And they can't sit around, like, notice what has just happened, right? The cops have played a super valuable, super important de escalation of the acute problem of people brawling in the street. But now notice what is simmering here. You basically have the Hatfields living across from the McCoys. And that needs to be figured out in sort of a medium long term sense or it's going to blow over again. The cops a, do not have the time to do that sort of mediation, right? Nor do they necessarily have, like the skills and the temperament, right? These guys who are real, they're real like they're super good at like shots fired calls. They're going, you know, pedal to the metal to try and diffuse that. To go in and talk to these two families and help them figure out how to live across the street from one another without this resorting to violence over and over again, you need a different type of capacity and a different sort of training and skill set. That, I think is where the community violence intervention organizations have a really important and complementary role to play.

[B]

So how much. To what extent is this being implemented? I mean, like, if, let's say you have the budget here in New York for, or in Chicago or in Minneapolis for policing and for intervention, other types of intervention, how do you manage that balance? How?

[C]

Yeah, I think the larger principle that I think I would keep in mind as I was trying to allocate my public safety budget is that these two capacities, police and community violence intervention, really need to be viewed as compliments, not substitutes.

[B]

Right, Right.

[C]

I think that is the overarching principle. And I don't know that I would know enough about the Minneapolis context to talk about where the marginal dollar goes. But you want adequate capacity in both of these institutions, because I think they really do reinforce each other and it goes in both directions. You know, in. In Chicago, there have been periods where the police department was not as effective as anyone would want. And the community violence intervention workers would say, that is making our lives much more difficult.

[B]

Right. So they recognize that they need each other. But are there programs that instruct them and help them work together? I guess. Are they really open to doing that? Completely.

[C]

I think that some cities are much better than others in trying to get the two institutions to work together and appreciate each other. The research center I help run, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, we are, we have a policing Leadership Academy where we're, you know, we're trying to help train the police commanders that work in the highest violence districts from around the country and how to do sort of data driven policing and police management kind of thing. We have a parallel community violence Intervention Leadership Academy where we're trying to train the people running these amazing local nonprofits to do the same thing. One of the things that we are trying to do ourselves is really make an effort to bring the two groups together to appreciate the value of each side. And again, because we're drawing in this small subset of neighborhoods across the country that are disproportionately driving the gun violence problem, hopefully building bridges there will have an outsized impact on collaboration and the gun violence problem more generally.

[B]

Does the police community recognize this and understand it?

[C]

Well, I would say there's variability. And I think one of the things that we. So one of the amazing people that we've been lucky enough to enlist in the Policing Leadership Academy program here is this amazing guy named Charlie Beck, who had been, as he likes to say, he had been police chief in LA for eight short years and then Interim police chief in Chicago for six long months. Tells you something about what the local politics are here in Chicago. And, you know, he. Like, I do think you, you've. Many people have probably heard the term credible messenger. And I think most people mean that in the context of community violence intervention, like someone out in the neighborhood who's, you know, you know, understands sort of the street and that sort of thing. But I think having a credible, credible messenger is also really important for police. So Charlie Beck gets out. I've seen him talk to the people in our policing, you know, the, the district commanders in our policing leadership Academy. And Charlie stands up and he says, look, I am a cops. Cop. I'm a cop. My dad was a cop, his dad was a cop. My kids are all cops. Like, I go, you know, I am as much of a cop as you could possibly imagine. And he said, I. When I took over as commander in the Rampart Division, many people, many people across the country, when you say Rampart Division and lapd, they will know what that means, right? This is not the cushy, easy job in LAPD to have. He says, I took over the Rampart. I think it was the Rampart Division. And I was like super skeptical about this whole cvi, whatever. And they came in and started working with us in the most dangerous public housing project that we had in my district. This is Charlie Beck all saying this. And he said that changed so dramatically that it made me a believer. I'm a convert now. And if you're a police commander, like, if someone like me were to say, oh, you should be open to this, they'd be like, oh, come on, give me a break. But someone like Charlie Beck saying, you, there is nobody out there who's got, you know, more policing credibility than Charlie Beck. And he says, I started off as a skeptic and I was converted. That makes a big. My sense is that that makes a big impression on people.

[B]

Are these community workers? Are they. Is it a profession of sorts or are they paid? Or is it more informal than that?

[C]

You know, a lot of these organizations start as, you know, this is like somebody in an impacted neighborhood lost a loved one, and they really want to devote their lives to doing something about this problem when they start this organization. So these are not like, you know, multinational corporation kinds of like, people are paid, but these are really like shoestring, hand to mouth, like really, really small, often small, sometimes medium sized nonprofits that are cobbling things together because somebody really cares about the community and cares about this problem.

[B]

What if Somebody who. Very liberal bent, would say that all you're doing is containing an issue and the underlying cause is still poverty.

[C]

And, yeah, I think, you know, it's an understandable reaction. You know, I think. Here's. I'll tell you my perspective on this, which is we spend a lot of time talking about, you know, the causal arrow from neighborhood poverty to gun violence. I think we don't spend nearly enough time talking about the causal arrow from gun violence to neighborhood poverty. Right. My. My University of Chicago colleague, Steve Levitt wrote a paper many years ago that showed that every murder that happens in a city reduces the city's population by 70 people. Fewer people moving in, more people moving out. Right. And so, like, you know, for instance, the Englewood neighborhood here on the south side is just a couple miles west of where I am here in Hyde park at the University of Chicago's main campus. You know, the city several years ago gave Whole Foods several million dollars in subsidies to open a Whole Foods right in the middle of Englewood, which consistently has one of the highest murder rates in the city of Chicago. And a few years later, the Whole Foods closed. Right. And it's like, why did that happen? Well, you know, Englewood, at one point, Englewood was a neighborhood of, I don't know, 50, 60, 70,000 people. I think it's much closer to, like, 20,000 now. And one of the big reasons that people have moved out of Englewood is because there are many reasons, but one important contributing factor is, is the gun violence problem, per Steve Levitt's estimates. And so there are just not enough people in Englewood anymore to support a grocery store like that. So the only way it would survive would be if people from surrounding neighborhoods all over the south side would be willing to drive to Englewood to go to the Whole Foods. And given the gun violence problem there, people are not willing to do that. And so I think, like, I've really come to believe that gun violence is the city problem that sits upstream of almost every other problem that cities face, that if you do not have the gun violence problem controlled, that is a huge headwind for every other sort of community development, economic development thing that you want to do. But. But. And the reverse is also true, that if you can get the gun violence problem under control, that creates a huge tailwind for community development, economic development as well.

[B]

This also reminds me a great deal of J.Q. wilson's, James Q. Wilson's work and some of what you've been doing riding around police cars. I think he did a lot of that as well?

[C]

Yeah, I think the data are a super. Looking at data is a super, like data and conceptual frameworks of how the world works is one very important way to understand the world. But I also think there's no substitute for just seeing things close. There's like a. There's so much more to reality than our conceptual models and data can sort of fully capture.

[B]

So from a policy perspective, like if you were the, I don't know, benevolent dictator, if you, if you could change things and really influence policy, what would you do? What would, how would you go about it?

[C]

Yeah, I think I would. I would focus on three things that we've touched on to varying degrees so far. So the first thing that I would do, and again, I'm saying all this, the city of Chicago, we're trying to dig our way out of a $1.2 billion budget deficit. So the way that I think about policy solutions is not let's throw money at the problem because unfortunately there's just not more money to throw at the problem. And so I'm always looking at this through the lens of literally, if I were mayor and had no money, what could I do? So the first thing that I would do is I would capitalize on the fact, as we talked about a few minutes ago, I would capitalize on the fact that we have learned something about how to teach people to avoid or navigate their way out of these difficult 10 minute windows when shootings happen. So that's sort of thing one. And we can do that at basically zero cost by infusing these sorts of programs into things like detention facilities. I think we could probably also do this in schools as well. I went to public school in New Jersey. I had, I think, four years of health class. If I remember correctly, most of it was a waste of time. Give us three weeks of the four year health curriculum to deliver this sort of behavioral science programming that existing teachers could do. We could save a bunch of lives. So that's sort of thing number one. And every city could do that even without more money, and they could start doing that like tomorrow. The second thing that I would do is also what we talked about before is I would pay much more attention to the fact that the built environment has outsized impact beyond what you would think. Like, you know, I mentioned, you know, doing even something as simple as like cleaning up a vacant lot and turning it into a pocket park can reduce violence. The effects are surprisingly large. There was an amazing study out of Philadelphia by the University of Pennsylvania that showed that doing that Turning a vacant lot with tall grass and trash and used condoms and needles and empty heroin baggies and all that sort of stuff into a little pocket park gets people out of their home. Shootings go down in low income neighborhoods by a shockingly large amount, by 30%. Right. That is not a small change. Like that is a really important difference from a policy lever that you would just not imagine has real relevance for the gun violence problem.

[B]

Very consistent with what Wilson found many.

[C]

Years ago and very consistent with what Jane Jacobs was arguing for many years ago. Right. And then the third thing that I would say is really sort of the motivation for why we're running the policing Leadership Academy, which is, and this is the third thing that I would suggest to cities that don't have lots more money is capitalize on the fact that there is a lot of predictable structure to when and where these arguments that escalate into shootings happen. So, you know, there's a. For instance, there's a liquor store here on the south side of Chicago that is open until midnight. Most other liquor, you know, most of the liquor stores on the South, Seth's side have to close at 10pm so up until 10, everybody's in their local neighborhood. They're going to buy their booze around all the people they went to high school with, all their friends. 1001, the witching hour hits. You want more booze, what do you do? You have no choice but to go to the one liquor store near you that's open until midnight. So now what you have is people from all over the south side. You said three years ago at our high school football, my high school was playing your high school. And you said the most horrible thing to my girlfriend at the time. And I haven't seen you since then. And all of a sudden we're both in line at this liquor store and you are right in front of me. What do you think? And we've both been drinking up until this point. What in the world do you think is going to happen at that point? And what's interesting about this is, you know, we've looked at the data for that very liquor store here on the south side. It is not a gun violence hotspot. If you look over the 24 hours of the day, it is only a gun violence hotspot between 10pm and midnight. And so what we need to get police departments and community violence intervention groups to do, for that matter, is make better use of data to target their resources in the times and places when violence is most likely to happen. There's not a study out of LA that shows that that has the potential to, you know, potentially even double the amount of crime prevention you get out of your existing police spending. That is something that every city could do a lot more of and get more public safety out of the money they already spent.

[B]

I think that plays a role here in New York and has played a role that they've tried to find where the geographically it really occurs.

[C]

And New York, New York and LA really have been the early and rapid adopters of doing that. And I think every other city in the US is still playing catch up.

[B]

And it also sounds like a lot of the victims of violent crime are actually people that people know. It's not random people in the street that are the victims. And it also sounds like, although you didn't mention it, but from everything you've said, I think maybe it's an old term, urban renewal, but the idea of creating those eyes on the street by really economically developing to the extent possible, these don't have to be, you know, massive new stores, but just to have half vibrant commercial districts. So the business does play a very important role.

[C]

And it's, you know, and it's not just, it's not just stores. Right. It is also other things to the built environment that you might, you know, there's research that shows that better lighting matters and vacant lots. As I, as I mentioned, cleaning up abandoned houses. You know, when I moved to Hyde Park 18 years ago, there was an abandoned house across the street from us here in Hyde park that was, you know, leaning. It was about to sort of topple over. Right. That's not the sort of thing that makes you want to go sit on your front porch and, and hang out.

[B]

Right. Right. We probably should begin to bring this to an end. This has been very, very interesting. What are you working on now and what are your current projects? Where does your passion lie right now?

[C]

Yeah, I think the, the big thing that we you that I'm focused on really sort of seeing through to completion now is this big policing leadership academy that I mentioned. And the reason that I'm so excited about that is one is as I mentioned, I think that every city in the country really has room to do so much more in using data. If you look at the best private sector organizations are making extreme use of data and analytics to guide what they're doing. The public sector has really been lagging that. And I think maybe the criminal justice system has been lagging even the rest of the public sector. So there's a Lot of room for improvement. And the other reason that I'm so excited about that is one of the big challenges in public policy is always the challenge of scale. We can find things. Sometimes we can find things that work, but how do you get these to really work at scale? And, you know, we did the math and it's like the hundred. The hundred biggest cities in the united. The hundred most violent cities in the United States account for somewhere between like 40 and 50% of the murders in America. And within each of those neighborhoods, it's like in each of those cities, it's like a handful of neighborhoods that tend to drive to violence. And so if I wanted to try and cut the national murder rate through a social program, I would have to figure out a way to deliver that to literally millions or tens of millions of people. But if I've got something that can make the precinct commander be much better at data driven management, there you're talking about training a couple hundred people around the country every year. That is something that we can for sure do. And so as a policy person at heart, I am always looking for where are these, like, outsized gains, these outside sources of, like, leverage and impact at scale. And. And I think that, to me, is, you know, one of the most promising things that I've seen in the public public safety.

[B]

It all comes down to AI.

[C]

It all comes down to, like, AI, behavioral science. And really, like, I think it comes down to pragmatism, right? It's like, is you. Is your goal to score political points or is your goal to solve problems? And if your goal is to solve problems, you start from the problem and look at the data honestly and work back from there. Rather than start from. My political ideology tells me I should think this. And that has much less good of a track record.

[B]

I think. System two thinking.

[C]

Exactly. Exactly.

[B]

Okay. This has been an enlightening conversation. I really appreciate it.

[C]

Jen's.

[B]

You have produced a powerful and humane book about American gun violence. The book is unforgiving. The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence for listeners. I'm Alfred Marcus and this has been on the cusp on the New Books Network where we explore how strategy, ethics and governance intersect in organizations and civic life. If you have comments or suggestions for future episodes, please reach me at [e-mail] [e-mail].