The Indicator from Planet Money - What we misunderstand about gun violence

Episode Date: May 14, 2025

The U.S. is known around the world for its problem with gun violence. The vast majority of murders in the U.S. are committed using guns. But what leads one person to shoot another? The "conventional wisdom" says gun violence is usually the act of calculated criminals or people acting out of desperate economic circumstances. But economist Jens Ludwig believes the conventional wisdom is wrong. Today on the show, he explains why he believes many of us fundamentally misunderstand the problem of gun violence and how behavioral economics reveals some potential solutions. Jens's new book detailing his research into gun violence is called "Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence".Related episodes:Can credit card codes help address gun violence? The money going into and out of gun stocksGuns and The Trump SlumpFor sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Music by Drop Electric. Find us: TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Newsletter. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. Yens Ludwig is an economist at the University of Chicago, and for years he's been obsessed with one of America's most intractable problems, gun violence. According to Pew Research, the vast majority of murders are committed with guns. And that's why in the mid-2000s, Yen's moved to Chicago's south side, looking for an answer to this question. What leads a person to shoot another? And what can we do about it? His research led him to all kinds of places. You know, I spent a huge amount of time out in schools, in parks, in courtrooms, in police stations, in the back of police cars, and in tons and tons of McDonald's all over the city as well.

What happens at the McDonald's is? One of the key things that happens in a McDonald's that doesn't happen in an office is you talk to people like they're real people. And they talk to you like you're a real person. After hours and hours of McDonald's conversations and years of crunching dinners. data, Yen says he now knows a lot more about what causes gun violence. And the answer is not what a lot of us have been told. No wonder we haven't made more progress on this problem. We've sort misdiagnosed what it is. And as a result, we've been deploying the wrong policy lovers. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Adrian Ma. Yen's recently published his findings

in a book called Unforgiving Places, the Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. Today on the show, he argues why the conventional wisdom around gun violence is wrong, and how behavioral economics reveals a path forward. For a long time, economist Jens Ludwig says the conventional wisdom we've been told about gun violence has followed this predictable pattern. On the right, gun violence is viewed as being due to people who are basically like incorrigibly bad

and unafraid of the criminal justice system's penalties. And so the only way to solve the problem is to disincentive. it by threatening people with bigger punishments. On the left, people tend to think that gun violence is due to economically desperate people who are trying to feed their families. The only solution is to disincentivize crime by offering people better alternatives to crime, like better jobs, better social safety net programs. Both the left and the right share the view that gun violence is sort of premeditated and deliberate, that people are basically like, like weighing the pros and cons before they ever pull a trigger. The classic rational actor, quote unquote. People are being rational actors, yeah. But when Yens and his colleagues at the University of Chicago began gathering data on shootings in the city, a different picture emerged.

We sent one of my, the other people who started the crime lab is my friend Harold Pollock, who went into the basement of the Chicago Police Department headquarters at 35th in Michigan here on the south side of Chicago and read through every homicide case file involving a juvenile. And Harold came back and he said, guys, I think gun violence is not what we think it is. It looks to me like most of these shootings are basically like they start with words. They're arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone's got a gun. I mean, think about that.

The events that led to most of these shootings were not carefully planned by mass shooters. They weren't the stuff of TV dropping. like a planned hit or a showdown over drug selling turf. Often, Yan says the causes are just a lot more mundane. For example, a guy gets off the train, walking down the street, accidentally steps on another guy's sneaker. The guy whose sneaker was stepped on said, I think you should apologize, but probably not that politely.

The guy who stepped on the sneaker said, I don't feel like apologizing, probably not said that politely. And one guy winds up debt. I mean, you just see examples like this over and over. over again, right? But it's such a radically different picture of what gun violence is. We were like, let's sanity check this by talking to violence interruptors who work for community violence intervention organizations and homicide detectives and police chiefs in Chicago and around the country. And, you know, what we heard over and over again was something super consistent with that.

And here is where Yen says a big aha moment came. This is not some classical economic problem, it's a behavioral economics problem. And behavioral economics is, you know, is this branch of economics focused on how psychology affects decision-making. And one of the big insights from behavioral economics is that when people are put in extremely high-stress situations, we often do not think rationally. Emotion and adrenaline take over. I really have come to think of gun violence as like normal human frailty that we all experience in moments of high stress. But some people are living in neighborhoods that are very unforgiving where there are lots of guns, not many systems around to de-escalate things,

are capable of de-escalating things when altercations sort of go off the rails. If a huge cause of gun violence is just our common human frailty, what can we do about that? And I know some of you are saying, what about gun control? If you reduce the number of guns, you reduce gun violence, right? Well, Yen says hypothetically, sure.

You know, we have 330 million people in America and our best guess is something like 400 million guns. The best available data suggests that on net, if you could get rid of the 400 million guns, the murder rate would decline in America, probably by a lot. But nobody has that button to push to make the 400 million guns in America disappear

anytime soon. You know, if we can't do a lot to dramatically change gun availability in the short term, there's a different thing that we can do, which is try and address the violence part of this, the willingness of people to use guns to hurt other people. And here is some actual good news. Yen says research shows a couple of strategies are really effective in doing this. One strategy is simply to teach people. So, for example, there's this program for middle and high school boys called Becoming a Man. They've got it in Chicago and a few other cities. And basically what they do is help boys learn what are called social cognitive skills, how to, you know, regulate their emotions and de-escalate conflicts. And Yens and his colleagues have studied the Chicago branch of

this program. And what they found was boys who went through it were less likely to be arrested for carrying guns and about 50% less likely to be arrested for violent offense. Which is a huge, huge reduction. And I think there are tons of ways that we can do that by incorporating more of that throughout the public school system and in every detention facility in the country. Like super scalable, super low cost. This should just be like a fundamental thing that we're teaching everybody. So, strategy one to reduce gum violence help people change their own behavior. Strategy two, help change people's environments. And this can be illustrated by a study, Yen's points to, that included researchers from the University of Pennsylvania.

So they went to Philadelphia, which, like many Rust Belt cities, has a lot of vacant, abandoned lots. And they worked with the city to raise money and hold a lottery to choose which of these lots would be cleaned up and converted into pocket parks. And the first thing that they could see is that people were way more likely to be out in public when the scary vacant lot is turned into a charming little pocket park.

So that's getting more. people out and about so that they can basically serve as eyes on the street to help de-escalate things, right? So when people are making mistakes, they've got a little bit of a safety net there for someone to step in and sort of break it up. And the second thing they can see in the police data is that there's a really big reduction in shootings around those areas. You know, depending on the neighborhood that you're looking at, these are like 10 to 30 percent reductions in shootings. So these sorts of interventions, teaching people how to check themselves, tweaking the environment to have more people around, they seem really effective in reducing gun violence. And they're not the typical policy solutions that we are told are the answer.

Like, how do you feel when you see these sorts of results? So my first reaction to looking at this evidence is heartbreak, thinking about the needless tragedies that have happened. And I think my second reaction to this is to feel hope. As we are starting to understand more and more about what gun violence actually is and realizing it's not what we thought, and so the solutions are not what we thought, we can see that it's much more fixable. I think let's see the problem for what it is,

and like let's get going starting yesterday. This episode was produced by Lily Kitos and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, Kaking Cannon edits the show and the indicators of production of NPR.