00:00:16 Speaker 1: Pushkin. 00:00:25 Speaker 2: Hello, hello, everyone. Malcolm Gladwell here. Greetings from Los Angeles. I'm out on tour for my new book, The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic, which is my examination of America's ongoing problem with criminal violence, specifically gun violence. I'm actually recording this from the closet in my hotel room. Last week, we read a chapter from the book, one of my favorite chapters, The Slave Owner's Lament, which you should listen to if you haven't yet, because I'm guessing it's the story you haven't heard about the Second Amendment, and which left me more than a little surprised and angry. Next week, and the week after, we're going to run a two-part series on the fascinating story about what's been happening in Baltimore over the last couple of years, along with, because this is what we do at Revisions History, a little excursion into the world of cardiac bypass surgery. But right now, I want to share with you a really fun and interesting interview I did with Brian Lehrer, who has one of the most popular shows on WNYC, New York City's public radio station. So have a listen. By all means, buy the book if you are interested. And if you want to catch me on the road, all of my book tour dates are up on my website, glabell.com. Thanks for listening, everyone. 00:01:52 Speaker 3: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Gun violence in America, not a new conversation or topic by any stretch, right? But there's actually a bit of a pattern. Every time there's a mass shooting, it comes back into the spotlight, into the headlines. Democrats express mounting frustration and not being able to institute much meaningful gun control reform, and then it kind of peters out, right? The news cycle moves on. Well, we're going to talk to Malcolm Gladwell about this because he's got a new book coming out tomorrow, officially, called The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic, in which he argues that the conversation around gun violence in the U.S. is misguided, that people focus too much on mass shootings and not enough on the kind of violence, gun violence, that disenfranchised communities see every day. To address that kind of violence, which makes up the vast majority, of gun violence in the United States. He says the country needs more cops and more intervention programs, both of those. By focusing so narrowly on gun control as a prevention strategy, he argues, gun violence activists are losing sight of the big picture. You might know Malcolm Gladwell because, well, he's one of the most popular nonfiction writers of our time. He's written a whole range of bestselling books on social phenomena, including Blink, The Tipping Point, and Outliers. That's the one where he coined the idea that anybody can be an expert at something if they dedicate 10,000 hours of practice to it. You've heard that. That comes from Malcolm Gladwell. He was a New Yorker staff writer for so many years, and he also hosts the podcast Revisionist History. Again, his new book, which comes out tomorrow, is called The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. Malcolm, thanks so much for coming on today. Always interesting to talk to you. Welcome back to WNYC. 00:03:48 Speaker 2: Thank you, Brian. 00:03:50 Speaker 3: Well, let's start with the title, The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. Why do you call the gun violence epidemic an invention? 00:04:00 Speaker 2: Well, I feel like it's not something that's inherent to America. I mean, if you look at our peer countries around the world in Western Europe or our neighbor to the North, Canada, which are in almost every other way very similar to the United States— They have homicide rates that are a fraction of the United States. And so we're clearly doing something peculiar and different that sets us apart from the normal way that developed 21st century Western democracies behave. So it seems like we're inventing something, right? America wasn't born with this problem. 00:04:40 Speaker 3: In the book, you say the conversation that the country tends to have around gun violence is dishonest. That's a strong accusation as opposed to kind of well-intentioned but misguided or something like that. Why dishonest? 00:04:54 Speaker 2: Well, I use a dishonest very broadly. And what I mean by that is that we focus on things that we pretend certain things are serious problems when they're not. And other things we focus on We pretend certain ideas are solutions when they're actually not really a solution. We avoid conclusions when they're too difficult. I mean, each chapter of the book takes a different aspect of the problem and shows how we've been fooling ourselves. I have two chapters on the Supreme Court and the kind of absurd way that the Supreme Court passes down gun rights rulings. Or you mentioned in your intro, one of the arguments of the book is that We have too few police in America. And the reason I say that is very simple. If you could just compare North American cities with European counterparts, I'll use LA as an example. LA and Berlin are exactly the same size. Los Angeles has 8,500 police officers. Berlin has 18,000. And that's typical of the difference between American cities and European cities. If you talk to any American police chief, they will tell you they have, they are, they are radically understaffed compared to their peers across the ocean. Americans think the opposite. We think we're over-policed. Nothing could be further from the truth. That's a, to my mind, there's a level of dishonesty involved in that, an unwillingness to kind of just look at the facts and draw reasonable conclusions. Instead, we have a, a kind of a conversation that's burdened with all kinds of fantasies about what we're doing. 00:06:31 Speaker 3: Well, that's probably the most controversial part of your book. Uh, I'll read an excerpt of your words. In 2020, an African-American man in Minneapolis named George Floyd was killed by a rogue police officer, setting off an extraordinary wave of protests around the country over police brutality. The motto of the protesters was defund the police. If police were badly behaved, the thinking went it was because there were too many of them, unquote, from your book. So there's a lot to unpack there. For one thing, You know, many people would argue, no, this was not a rogue police officer. Police officers are not maybe doing things every day like that officer did or those officers did to George Floyd. But they're a function of something systemic, the way policing is done. Do you disagree with that? 00:07:29 Speaker 2: I don't. In fact, I think that's spot on. However, the conclusion from that observation is wrong. It is absolutely the case that American police as a group use more force and are more violent and kill more civilians than most other Western police forces around the world. We conclude from that that we have too many police. The exact opposite is true. Police, when you do an international comparison, you find that the most violent and repressive police forces in the world are in countries where the police are the least numerous in Police violence is a response to being overwhelmed. If you feel like you're trying to police a large area with a limited number of people, you're only at one, not your only option, but one option is to project force, is to behave in an overly aggressive manner, is to try and demonstrate that you're bigger and tougher than you actually are. If you have police in sufficient numbers, you don't have to behave that way. And that's what we see when you do a There's two really, really, really wonderful sociologists at Harvard did this international comparison where they showed this, that the most violent police forces in the country, in the world, are in countries where they have the fewest police and the best behaved are in the countries that have the most police. And this is their argument that police violence is a response to being overwhelmed. 00:09:13 Speaker 3: So you argue we need more cops, but also that people need to trust them more and work with them more in order to be safer. But there's such a long history of people not only being let down by cops when, you know, maybe they are under enforcing in some ways in high crime areas, but actually being brutalized by cops. 00:09:32 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:09:33 Speaker 3: So how do you think that trust can be rebuilt? 00:09:36 Speaker 2: I think I had a really fascinating discussion when I was doing my book with a guy named Daniel Oates. who is one of the most progressive, thoughtful police chiefs, big city police chiefs in this country. And we were talking about this. He used to be the police chief in Aurora, Colorado, among other places. And he was, you know, when I said to him, do you have too few police officers? He was like so wholeheartedly in agreement. He was like, unbelievable. You don't understand how undermanned we are. He talked about what would happen if he had European levels of police officers. In other words, what would happen if we doubled the size of his police department in Aurora? He was saying that would permit me to get my officers out of the car, to work closely with community leaders, to find out about troubles before they bubble to the surface, to have a much closer feel for what's going on in schools, because that's where juvenile delinquency leads in many cases to more serious crimes down the road. You really want to be intervening and getting to know kids before they get in serious trouble. He went down the list. For 40 minutes, he talked without stopping about all the things he could do if he had more police officers. And he said, when you have too few, as almost every big city police officer, police chief, police department in this country does, you can't get your officers out of the car. What they're doing is they are racing from one emergency to the next and never have the time to build those kinds of ties with the community that are so important. We have so got this backwards in this country and every I could line up every police chief in this country and they would say, oh, you're absolutely right. I can't do what I need to do. They don't want to be, they don't want to have a mistrustful relationship with the general public. They don't want to have people in their force who use excessive violence. They're trapped in this situation because they have half the resources of other countries around the world. 00:11:41 Speaker 3: But do you also not think that there need to be big reforms? in how the police approach policing. You did a stat, which is part of what you do, right? You look at data and you try to draw conclusions about issues in the world from big data sets. And so you were comparing the high rates of gun violence in the United States with relatively fewer police to. 00:12:14 Speaker 3: Lower rates of gun violence in cities around the world with more police. But I think a lot of people would argue there are other reasons, at least in addition, for the violence in the United States, including the police violence in the United States, the history of slavery and the role of the police early, early on in enforcing that being among them. 00:12:36 Speaker 4: Oh, yeah. 00:12:37 Speaker 2: I mean, this is, Brian, I was just talking about one chapter in a book with many chapters. You're absolutely right. 00:12:43 Speaker 3: I understand. 00:12:46 Speaker 2: I don't mean to suggest, and I don't argue, that this is a problem solely about the police. The police, the under-resourced nature of police departments in the U.S. is one factor of many that account for this ongoing American crisis. And I kind of walk through, you mentioned, for example, the legacy of slavery. And I have a whole chapter called The Slave Owner's Lament, which talks about how our notion of gun rights in America arises out of our experience with slavery. The reason the Second Amendment exists is that plantation owners in the 18th century, in places like Virginia and South Carolina, were very anxious when the Constitution was first proposed that they would lose the right to have militias, slave patrols. The armed groups of men who went around making sure that the slaves were under direct control, weren't rising up and protesting or trying to overthrow their overseers. And the Second Amendment was an attempt by James Madison to mollify the plantation owners of Virginia and South Carolina, whose votes were essential for the ratification of the Constitution. So when the Second Amendment says, because a militia is so central to a safe and secure country, we need the right to bear arms. What he's doing is he's saying to the slave owners, we're giving you this so you can continue to keep your slaves under control. 00:14:26 Speaker 3: And yet, and maybe ironically, you also have in the book this bit about the Wild West, but a lot of it is in the South. which of course was the slaveholding part of the country, that when pistols came onto the market in the first half of the 19th century, gun violence became a huge issue. And then a lot of places that were dealing with this violence, like Texas, which we might not guess, and Arkansas, which we might not guess, actually instituted pretty strict Gun laws, much stricter than they have today. Give us a little of that history. 00:15:02 Speaker 2: Yeah, it is a fascinating kind of deja vu moment in American history. The exact same argument that we have today about gun violence was happening in America in the mid-19th century because the arrival of the revolver dramatically changed the scale of violence that people were seeing, particularly in the frontier West, that all of a sudden, Pistols were cheap. They were efficient. You didn't have to reload. You could fire six shots at one time. And this created a huge spike in the level and the concern over gun violence in the United States. In response to that, one town after another, and the list of cities and towns that enacted very, very strict gun control laws, ordinances in response to the rise of the revolver is, I mean, it's as long as my arm. It's like all around the country, particularly in the South and the West. City after city passed laws that said things like, if you enter our town, you have to give up your gun, or you have to pay a massive tax if you want to buy a gun, or you have to, you know, register your gun with the local authorities, or, I mean, the kinds of things that we think of as unthinkable today were a a matter where commonplace, particularly in the so-called Wild West, I have a whole chapter about the myth of the Wild West. The Wild West is a incredibly, the notion of this kind of violent period on the American frontier was incredibly brief because one town after another on the frontier enacted these incredibly strict gun control ordinances to make sure that when young men came into town, armed young men came into town and started drinking in the local bars, they had to give up the guns first. It's a funny kind of version of American history. 00:17:04 Speaker 3: So how did it flip? 00:17:07 Speaker 2: How did it flip? It flipped because our conversation about gun violence became dishonest. If you talk to people, if you look at the way the public discussion about gun violence happened in the mid-19th century, what you see is a very kind of honest understanding about what the problem was. The problem was young men were getting drunk and were settling arguments with pistols, with pistols that were very deadly, and that that was causing a spike in homicides, and that the quickest way to get control over this problem was to take away the pistols. So they settled their arguments with fists and knives instead of a more lethal weapon, right? People weren't pretending. They weren't pretending the problem was something other than it was. And they weren't erecting some kind of ideological barrier to taking that kind of action. It was felt that if you were in some, you know, roaring frontier town where things were veering out of control, there was some common sense steps you could take to bring them back under control, right? And it wasn't progressives and bleeding heart liberals making this argument. It was the town father's who were tired of seeing young men being killed on Friday and Saturday nights in their city. So what has happened, I think, is that we've allowed politics and ideology to kind of permeate every aspect of this discussion. And in my book, I try and stay completely out of politics entirely. There is no ideology here. in the American way of killing. I'm not making a Democratic argument or a Republican argument. In fact, I place the blame equally on both sides. This should not, there is no reason that this argument, this discussion should be partisan. The minute you make it partisan, you lose track, lose contact with reality. 00:19:03 Speaker 3: What's the part that you blame on Democrats? 00:19:07 Speaker 2: I think that Democrats have people, that there's a certain kind of gun control fetishism that has taken over a lot of the progressive response to gun violence. And I have no problem in theory with that. Like I've just said, I think that this is an important piece of the puzzle. But it can't be the only thing you're doing. Realistically, how quickly could we get meaningful gun control in this country? The court has been leading, both Congress and the courts have been leading the country in the opposite direction for a generation. This is, even if it works... This is a battle that's gonna be 25 or 30 years in the making, right? So what do you do in the interim? If you put all your eggs in that basket, you've got nothing to help people right now. And when I went in for this book and talked to people who are doing homicide prevention on the front lines, they don't even mention gun control. Not because they aren't in favor of it. They are. But just because it doesn't help them right now. With the last two major Supreme Court rulings on gun violence, the Bruin case and the Heller case, the court is making it harder and harder and harder to pass meaningful gun control in this country. The The Bruin case took away New York State's handgun law, which had been in place for 100 years, in which there was clear evidence that it reduced suicides by gun in New York State, dramatically reduced suicides by gun in the United States. The court took that away. That's where we're going with gun control. We're not winning right now. So the question is, we should continue to fight the good fight, but that can't be the only thing you talk about, right? You've got to You have to broaden your response. And I feel like even in doing interviews for this book, I find that my interviewers, they just want to talk about guns all the time. You can't just talk about guns. 00:20:59 Speaker 3: All the time. Malcolm Gladwell. is my guest with his new book about gun violence in the United States called The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. And Carolyn in St. 00:21:21 Speaker 2: Louis. 00:21:21 Speaker 3: You're on WNYC with Malcolm Gladwell. Hi, Carolyn. Thank you for calling in. 00:21:25 Speaker 4: Hi, Brian. Thank you so much. I really appreciate this discussion. And my husband and I believe that part of the problem is what your guest is talking about the police in other countries, their philosophy is that they're to remind the people of the law. But in the U.S., our police have the philosophy that they are the law. And I think if we could just define those two differences and take a look at how we might start to change people's minds here in the United States, That might be an approach. I don't know. 00:22:11 Speaker 3: What do you mean by are the law? Do you want to expand on that a little bit and get a little specific, Carolyn? 00:22:20 Speaker 4: Well, you know, as we see it, there are so many situations where there are definitely not enough people to help with those that have mental illness. and things that the police are just not trained to deal with. But like George Floyd, I mean, if you look at situations around the country, it's just that we, our police, think that they are the law. And I think that that's coming down from the top, not just the top of the police, department, but I think from the very top of the administration. And we've got to remind people that the police, I think, and I'd like to know what your guest thinks, that the police are here to remind people of what the law is. 00:23:22 Speaker 3: Carolyn, thank you very much. Malcolm? 00:23:26 Speaker 2: Yeah, so I think she's, I think Carolyn is raising an important point, which is, if you go back to the The father of modern policing was Sir Robert Peel, who was the Englishman who founded the Metropolitan Police in London in the late 18th century. And he has a famous set of 10 principles of policing, which are as relevant today as they were back then. And one of his principles, the one I love the most, is the police are the people and the people are the police, which I think is what Carolyn was talking about, that his idea from the very beginning was that the police are one of us and there ought not to be a clear line between the ordinary citizens and the people who are charged with reminding us about what the law is. And that principle is not lost in America. There are many, many, many wonderful police officers and police chiefs in this country. But we have these really troubling edge cases like George Floyd, which cause an enormous amount of mistrust between the general public and the police. And we need, I think, to recapture. If you just look at something as simple as what they call clearance rates, what percentage of crimes are solved by the police? In Europe, clearance rates are often for a homicide. These sort of 85% to 90% of homicides are solved by the police. In many American big cities, that number is well below 50%. And why is that? Because people don't trust the police, right? The only way you can solve a homicide is if people come forward, people from the community. So we need, I think that part of the thing that needs to be restored is that notion that the people are the police and the police are the people. And I think one of the ways you get there is by thinking much more seriously about how you spend your resources on public safety. 00:25:22 Speaker 3: In the book, You spend some time drawing a distinction between what you call instrumental violence and expressive violence. Instrumental violence and expressive violence. What is that distinction and why do you think it's important? 00:25:37 Speaker 2: Oh, it's a crucially important one. And this is another area where the conversation we have about gun violence is misguided. Instrumental violence is a crime committed in the course of some large irrational end. I'm robbing a bank. The guard gets in the way. I shoot the guard, right, in order to rob the bank. That's instrumental violence. It's planned. It's executed. There's a rational goal. If you look at the way we discuss homicide in popular culture, it's almost all instrumental. I do an analysis of a season of Law & Order. which is probably watched by more people know about homicide from law and order than probably anything else. It's all instrumental crimes. People have a clear motive. They got some goal. They commit the murder in order to get something else. Expressive violence is violence committed in the heat of emotion. Where the violence is the point. You killed my brother. So I'm coming after you and I see you in a bar and I pull a gun and I shoot you. That's expressive violence, right? It's emotional violence. it's spontaneous, it's unplanned, it's often regretted after the fact, and the violence is, I'm trying to settle some, to enact some kind of rough justice. Most of the homicide that we see in the United States is expressive. And once you understand, it's young men settling arguments with guns. That's what homicide is, right? And any solution which fails to have that notion at its core is not a solution. So if I say, I want to curb violence, gun violence by doubling the length of sentences for shootings. That's not going to solve our problem. Because the young man who is really, really upset and maybe drunk or high and sees his enemy in a bar and pulls a gun, he's not thinking about the long-term consequences of his actions. He's not thinking, oh, I shouldn't do this because I'm looking at 40 years instead of 20, right? That whole idea that you could affect the behavior of someone just by tinkering with the length of a sentence is When the behavior itself is impulsive and emotional and being done by an 18-year-old who has very, very poor conflict management skills, I mean, it's just absurd. 00:27:53 Speaker 3: And so you're right a lot about social programs designed to help curb gun violence through training school-age students to maintain their emotions and avoid resorting. to violence like the kind you were just describing. Some form of this already exists in a lot of places where we see the most gun violence, New York and elsewhere. So are they doing it wrong? Or what would you say about that effort? 00:28:21 Speaker 2: That effort is, when it has been tried properly, has been extraordinarily successful. I've just done two episodes of my podcast on Baltimore and what's going on in Baltimore, where they've seen unbelievable drops in homicides in the last couple of years under the Brandon Scott administration. They've gone from 350 homicides a year and they make it under 100 this year, and that's in three years. I mean, it's a kind of unprecedented decline. And what they're doing there is exactly a form of what I'm talking about. They are essentially intervening on a personal, individualized basis in any social situation that they think might lead to a homicide. So you shoot my brother, right? And so the police... come to me and they say, Malcolm, I know you just lost your brother and you're angry and you're upset. And I know that you just posted on social media that you're going after Brian. Don't do it. Let us help you. Let's talk you through this. And then you, you know, you, that kind of, you bring in my father or my pastor or somebody to talk to me and talk me down off the ledge. You offer me support services to make sure I don't retaliate. It's that kind of, that has proven to be extraordinarily effective. It has nothing to do with arresting people, nothing to do with threatening them with prison, nothing to do with carrying a gun and going in and waving it around. It has to do with meeting people where they are and understanding that the roots of criminal violence are in emotions. and in broken relationships and in fractured social circumstances and in unforgiving environments. That's the approach that we need if we want to take this problem seriously. 00:30:01 Speaker 3: So if we look, for example, at the New York City stat that a disproportionate amount of gun violence is perpetrated in very few neighborhoods. 00:30:12 Speaker 2: Exactly. That is exactly. 00:30:13 Speaker 3: Would you say that kind of training needs to be, what, just multiplied in terms of the amount of it or changed in terms of the approach of it in those particular neighborhoods? Like if Mayor Mamdani were to be listening in. 00:30:28 Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, New York has been exceedingly successful in recent years. I mean, New York is probably the most kind of advanced neighborhood homicide fighting force in the country. That's why our violent crime rates are so incredibly low in this city. And a lot of what I've been talking about is something that has been part of New York City practice for some time now. Ever since the city switched from the in retrospect disastrous policy of mass incarceration during the mass arrests during the Giuliani years to this much more focused policy that we have now. You know, one of the One of the key findings that drives this more enlightened approach to gun violence is at any given time, even in a very large community, the number of people who are engaged or at risk for gun violence is very, very small. In Baltimore's Western District, where they've been doing the bulk of this work, it's an area of 40,000 people. The belief is that we're talking about a couple of hundred young men at any given time who are at risk for shooting someone or being shot. There was a great analysis done in west side of Chicago, 50,000 people in the west side. The gun manager, Papa Christos, did work where he showed that we're probably talking about 400 people who are at risk for gun violence. It's very small. That's why you can do individualized attention. 00:31:54 Speaker 3: We have two minutes left, one more caller, and it won't surprise you that your call earlier in the segment for more police rather than fewer as a way to control gun violence and police violence, is drawing most of the response. Lynn in Portland, Oregon, you're on WNYC with Malcolm Gladwell. We have 30 seconds for you, Lynn. Go for it. 00:32:23 Speaker 2: Go, Lynn. Oh, boy. 00:32:24 Speaker 1: Okay, thanks a lot. Yeah, I agree with everything that Mr. Gladwell is saying. I have seen what happened in Portland, Oregon, post-George Floyd. And the population went from really not making the cops a big deal to there's just a real rift between the police and the public. And I was helping a woman try to come down from a bridge where she was attempting to commit suicide. And unbeknownst to me, the police were called. And when they came in, she totally freaked out. She didn't jump, but it became a highly escalated scene. I tried to have the cops understand that this woman is afraid of you. She doesn't want to have you help her. And they told. 00:33:14 Speaker 3: The screener they were they were dressed in war gear. And that's part of what scared. 00:33:19 Speaker 1: Her going to World War Three. 00:33:21 Speaker 3: Then I'm going to leave it there because we have 30 seconds for Malcolm to have the last word. I know you got to go. Malcolm, go for it. Then we're done. 00:33:29 Speaker 2: No, that's exactly what I'm talking about. That's what you do when there is a rift between you and the community. You dress up like an invading force and you lose your ability to have a real conversation with the people that you're supposed to be helping. And I think that's one of the things we need to address in this country. 00:33:48 Speaker 3: Malcolm Gladwell. author of many bestselling books, Blink, The Tipping Point, Outliers. His new one is called The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. Malcolm, thank you very much. 00:34:01 Speaker 2: Thank you, Brian. 00:34:08 Speaker 3: Recorded live on WNYC's The Brian Lehrer Show. Revisionist History is hosted by Malcolm Gladwell. 00:34:20 Speaker 1: And produced by me, Nina Bird Lawrence, with Lucy Sullivan and Ben Natafafri. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. 00:34:27 Speaker 3: Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Original music by Luis Guerra. 00:34:32 Speaker 1: Mixing and mastering by Jake Gorski. 00:34:35 Speaker 3: Special thanks to WNYC, Brian Lehrer, and Lisa Allison.