The Oprah Podcast - Why Is America Different Than Every Other Country When It Comes to Guns?

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

BUY THE BOOK! The American Way of Killing by Malcolm Gladwell⁠https://amzn.to/4jvQMuE⁠ Malcolm Gladwell - one of America’s foremost thought leaders - examines our country’s obsession with guns and the devastating toll gun violence has taken on our communities. In his new book, The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic, Malcolm challenges some of our most deeply held beliefs about American gun violence: what we’re missing about the root cause of most violence, how modern medicine is obscuring the reality of the problem, why the answer might be more police—not less—and how we’ve lost sight of the historical context surrounding the Second Amendment. Oprah and Malcolm speak with a Chicago based E.R. doctor who lost 15 close friends and family members to gun violence. He teaches students as young as fourth grade how to treat a gunshot wound. This episode also offers some common sense solutions to a seemingly intractable problem.00:00:00 - Welcome Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The American Way of Killing”00:04:20 - European vs. American police00:08:50 - Stats around more police00:09:50 - Malcolm’s experience with guns00:13:30 - Welcome Dr. Pratt00:16:33 - Talking to kids about gun violence00:19:15 - Changing gun violence00:21:00 - Treating gun shot wounds00:25:13 - The 2nd amendment00:29:00 - Crime vs. violence00:33:45 - Instrumental vs. expressive violence00:40:00 - Are we learning from our mistakes?00:43:00 - The gun problem is not unsolvableFollow Oprah Winfrey on Social:⁠https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/

What is it that you think specifically we are refusing to see about America's gun violence? Our problem in this country is not crime. Our problem is a violence. You teach children as young as fourth grade how to treat gunshot wounds. We've lost track in America of just how far out on a limb we are. And that's why so many people have called for defunding the police. I think that's exactly backwards. The most important thing to understand.

is there is something you can do about it. Hi there. Warm welcome to you all. Thank you for joining me here on the Oprah podcast. Well, my guest today is, I just, he's one of the smartest people on earth, literally, and he's a driver of the cultural conversation for many years now, challenging what we think we know about our most deeply held beliefs. And now Malcolm Gladwell, that's who's here today, has done it again. this time about an issue that has really weighed heavily for me,

and I'm sure it has also weighed for a lot of you, too. It's America's obsession with guns and the utter devastation those guns have wrought on our country. So welcome to the tea house, Malcolm Gladwell. I tried to be here. I read this book in one sitting. You were texting me. I was texting you while I was reading it.

I was getting like my text is, yes. Yeah, I don't know. Is that irritating when somebody... I was like, look, we just texted me. No, I read it in one sitting, the American way of killing. And I have to say, my eyes were open in ways that I didn't even expect. What drove you to explore gun violence? You say it's the invention of an epidemic we have here.

Well, I've been writing about it my whole career, one way or another. In blink? I wrote about it in Blink. I wrote about it in Tipping Point, was about a chapter, was about the declining crime in New York. I think it's because I say this in the instruction to the book, I grew up in rural Canada. Yeah.

And I was obsessed as a child with the United States, this place I'd never been to. Life magazine. That was your picture of who we were, yeah. And it seemed so exotic, so fascinating, so exciting. And I was struck by how dangerous it was. I would read, you know, Time magazine every week as an eight-year-old. And there were all of these stories about people being killed.

And I, in Canada in the 70s, That's a, that was a unusual thing. Literally a foreign concept. Yeah. Yeah. I never knew anyone who had ever been shot or I never knew anyone who had a gun.

I never knew anyone who had been murdered. So your news stories in the evening on your local news in Canada were not about the number of people shot. We didn't have a TV, believe it or not. But when I went to someone's house, they would show the newscasts from Buffalo, which were all about fires

and crimes. But Toronto never had that. I mean, it was, so it was just, I grew up fascinated by this fact that here we have this neighbor, which looks like our country, the people are the same. We worship the same God and eat the same food and drive the same cars, but down there is a whole lot of killing going on. And up here there's not, and I didn't understand why. I think this paragraph on page 226 reads like a mission statement for the book. You write, the American way of killing. is the story of a country that has lost its way.

The United States is a place of extraordinary wealth. Its scientists and entrepreneurs and intellectuals are the envy of the world. Yet it suffers from a level of lethal violence that would be unthinkable among any of its peers in the developed world. You're saying two things can be true at once. America is the envy of the world and also what?

It's baffling, I think, to the rest of the world. I think people legitimately, I don't know whether Americans are aware of the extent to which people from other countries like Canada or Europe. I was just in Finland last week and people were asking me this question. Yeah. Just kind of beyond puzzlement. It's kind of what is going on there? And was there a moment in your research when something you had always believed about American violence turned out to be wrong? What shifted for you in the writing?

so many things, but I'll give you one example. I have always known that the amount of money that the United States and other Western countries spend on public safety, cops and prisons and criminal justice system, is roughly the same, right? There's not big differences in how much. But what I discovered in writing this book was, in the United States, we spend this much on prisons

and this much on police, and in Europe they spend this much on police and this much on prisons. I know. I was fascinated by that, too. L.A. and Berlin are the same size. Yeah. L.A. has, I think, 8,500 police officers. Berlin has 17,000.

I thought America was sort of over-policed. Turns out, no, no, no, we're over-prisoned. A European police chief coming to America would say, where are your police? How on earth do you expect to have a good relationship with the community, to know what people are worried about, to take care of people, if your cops are running around and there are cars all day because they're overworked and undermanned.

Yeah. That was a real eye-opener. Yeah. You use the example. I think it's Aurora, Colorado, where that example comes like... I talked to the police chief. Yeah. He's a very well-known police chief in America.

I called it up and I said, what would happen in your town if you had European levels of police? In other words, if I gave you twice as many police officers, and he went on, he talked, Without stopping, 40 minutes, it was such an eye-opening comment. He clearly thought about this over and over and over again. And no one had ever asked him this question. He'd been waiting his entire career for someone to say, what would you do with more police?

And he talked about things like, I would have the freedom to have police officers walking the streets and getting to know people in the community. I could find out about problems before they bubble to the surface. I could make sure that on a Saturday night it didn't take 20 minutes to get to the scene of a crime, that it took five minutes. I could identify the parts of my city that are hard for the police to get to and make sure they can always get.

I mean, he went on and on and on and on. And his point was, if I had more police, I could be better at my job and that I could be closer to the community. I could have my finger on the problems that are happening in my town. He couldn't understand why we would have put ourselves, a wealthy country would put ourselves in a situation where we are underinvesting. investing in the prevention of crime and over-investing in penalizing people once we catch them. A lot of what the police do is common sense management of behavior. It's not arresting people.

You don't measure the value of a police force by the number of people they arrest. We know that that's a bad way to think about it. The right way, so I was talking to a guy who spent a lot of time, a research or crime research, criminologist. He was traveling with the Chicago PD, and he was talking about what do they do? typical evening. And he said, for example, we saw a man and a woman, clearly partners, man and wife maybe, having a really, really angry argument. Nothing had happened yet, but something could happen. The police officer sees this, stops, goes over, talks to them, calms them down. Sees her backed against the fence, yeah. Sees her backed against the fence,

sends the man home and says, you know, dude, you got to cool off. You got a D.S. Yeah. So what that was doing, but because the police officer was there, and present, he was able to potentially stop a crime that might have happened 10 minutes or 15 minutes later. And that's the right way to think about what the police can do. They are mediators in the community who can use other community resources to help people get through these difficult moments when they resort to violence. And yet, for many in this country, it's not how people think about the police. They think about the police as being there to aggravate a situation. and that's why so many people have called for defunding the police.

And do you think that people have gotten that wrong? I think we're confusing two things. That when we talk about defunding the police, what we're talking about is an objection to the police using force, to the police brutality. Routality and projecting their power in a way that's aggressive. And that is a legitimate issue. And I think people feel that if you have less police,

then you would have less of that. I think that's exactly about it. In fact, there's a brilliant study that was done by these two guys at Harvard who were the furthest thing from conservatives. They're, in fact, self-identified socialists. And they make this argument that around the world, levels of police brutality are highest in places where the police are fewest. But if you're a police officer being violent or aggressive, is the thing you do when you're outgunned, when there's not enough of you around, when you're outnumbered by the people you're trying to control. If you have lots of police, they're not under that same kind of stress and pressure. They don't have to project their energy in that way.

It's easier to be calm. That was a fundamental insight that maybe really rethink a lot of what I thought about crime. Well, you know, I've never fired a gun. And I was intrigued by your description of your firing a gun. Was that your first time firing a gun? It was my first, yeah. Okay. So I went to a firing range in the middle of the countryside.

in North Carolina with a gun expert. And what did you learn from physically experiencing firing a gun about its power that you couldn't have learned from everything you've ever read about guns? It's funny, because I literally, Oprah never even picked up a gun. Nor have I. Nor have I.

Yeah. But it's an odd thing for me to say since I've been writing about criminal violence for... But you never even picked up a gun. I never even held a gun. I don't know if I've ever even... I mean, I'd seen one on TV, But so I go out with this guy, a lovely guy, who's a serious gun expert.

He said, I'm going to take you, we're going to shoot an assault rifle in a firing range out in the country, and I'm going to teach you all about guns. And it was profoundly weird experience to have that much power in your hands, right? I've never been in a situation where if I had simply turned 45 degrees, I could have killed him. never been in that sort of situation. I just thought it was a strange, really weird feeling. And so that was kind of unsettling. Yeah.

Here I was with someone who knew a lot about guns, was an expert, and I realized how much knowledge you need to be a good user of a gun. Here's a guy who spent a lot of time and a lot of energy, thought through. The way he handled the gun, the precautions he took, the way he described it. That, I'm fine with that.

If people are going to be that, thoughtful about it. Yeah, but people aren't going to be that thoughtful about. That's the problem. Yeah, yeah, well, there's this striking moment when you actually hit the, you don't do it at first, but when you hit the cardboard center in the chest, did seeing that bullet hole change anything emotionally for you?

Like, wow, that's to represent a man's chest, and now you've hit the chest. Yeah. When I was shooting that gun, I was like, I am so far removed from the reality of gun violence. to me, I'm getting shaken by firing a gun at a cardboard cutout. There are people in this country who have firsthand experiences with someone firing a gun. Who are walking around packing right now.

The gulf between the experience that most of us have with guns and the experience that a small number do is, I was sort of struck by, there's a huge, huge gap between my experience, everyone else's. Well, I want to bring in Dr. Pratt because you opened the book, introducing us to Dr. Abdullah Pratt, an ER doctor who joins us from his hometown. Chicago, I call it my hometown too, Dr. Pratt. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome.

Thank you all for having me. It is truly the greatest of honors to be amongst you all, to hear from Malcolm again, and to hear your voice, Ms. Winfrey, which is one I've heard every night, going to sleeps every time I was a child for your late running of your show every night with my family. So thank you all for having,

It was truly honest. Did you know, Dr. Pratt, did you know I begin my book with you? With, I don't know if you knew that, but it all starts. The opening page starts with you. And we learned that you grew up on the south side in an area plagued by gun violence and that you chose, chose to stay living and working there. So gun violence is deeply personal for you. Tell us why.

When you grow up and every child has their why experience of why they, want to be a physician. Many times I think of the pain and suffering of friends, family members, and loved ones and just wanting to fix it. The day my brother died, I can remember sitting there and thinking, if I was here, what I've done, and I'm not trained enough. I was just a student. I was a medical student. Tell us how your brother died. Your brother died trying to keep some other kids from stealing a car, I read. That is the best theory that the detectives could come up with back in 2012 in that bloody summer of 2012. He was unfortunately murdered. on his way home, and he was a defender of the neighborhood.

And that same defense allowed me to become a physician and to focus on science. And that's one reason why I chose to become an emergency physician. Our last conversations were about, you know, the resiliency needed to actually pursue a career where you can both focus on helping save people individually, but also give back to the communities that bred us. I think people may be listening to us may be shocked to hear this. I don't know how we can be shocked anymore. But you teach children as young as fourth grade how to treat gunshot wounds.

Tell us how that came about and why that's necessary in your community. Absolutely. When I was a training student, I worked a lot for the Urban Health Initiative here at the University of Chicago, which was founded by our illustrious Mrs. Obama. And one thing I would go out in the communities and every, you'd say I'm teaching on health literacy, and people would say, hey, that's fine, but what do I do? you know, I have an emergency. And if someone is shot, my son was shot, my cousin was shot, did I do the right thing?

And so as we were opening a level one trauma center in Chicago where there hadn't been one for the whole South Side in many, many years, that was one of the first demands of a community that was suffering so much trauma and violence. And we saw what was happening in Sandy Hook and after the Parkland School shootings down in Florida where those students and communities galvanized themselves around school safety and trying to do something to empower themselves to be prepared. And that was not happening in our communities where children were being shot every single day. So that is what started that journey just at the early points of my career as an early conversation point that gave the community something before

I ever asked of them. What do you tell a fourth grader about how to treat a gunshot wound? The first thing I do was listen. You know, when I tell them I'm an emergency room physician, so many thoughts go through their mind. If you ask a middle-aged person about emergency room doctor named Dr. Pratt, they're going to bring up the show ER and refer to Mackay Fiefer's character. But when you ask a child about emergency rooms, they think of who they've lost there.

So many times they want to express that they've been in these scenarios, these situations and did not feel prepared and have not coped with that. And so once you listen and then you, teach from that point of view to say, well, let's make, wouldn't you want to be in a situation where you could help save a life, your mother's life, a friend's life, your own life? And unfortunately, and fortunately, we've had those youth come back to us who've actually had to use those skills in their daily life. What did you learn from spending time with Dr. Pratt? One of the lessons I took from it was, you know, the conversation you've just been having with Dr. Pratt right now and that I had

with him a couple of years back when I went out to Chicago, that conversation does not happen in any other developed country in the world. There is no other peer country to the United States where a doctor would, A, have had that kind of personal experience with gun violence, where part of his responsibility in the community is to train fourth graders about how to respond to gunshot wounds. We've lost track in America of just how far out on a limb we are. There's no, you couldn't even imagine this conversation in Canada or Germany or Japan or France. Like this is, I remember sitting in the basement of University Chicago Hospital with you and just thinking, this is strange, right?

It's like it's a profoundly out-of-body experience. We've become so accustomed to it that we don't even recognize it as strange. Yeah. The other thing that I took from my conversation with Dr. Pratt, was you stayed, right? And the overwhelming tendency of Americans is to run from this problem. Right.

And your example is, I think, such an important and powerful one that we've got to stop running from it. Well, I think what's interesting is what you were saying earlier, the distance between you who's never even held a gun in your hand and people in communities where carrying a gun or gun usage is a daily practice

is a foreign concept also for many Americans, for many Americans. So, Dr. Pratt, what do you think could make a difference in move the needle on this epidemic of gun violence? What do you think? You're in it daily. I think that the same things that I see every day as an emergency room physician on Chicago, South Side, where I have to balance a heart attack in one room, a stroke in the next room, then two or three people come in shot. Who do you go to first? what do you do first?

What do you do next? That's the same approach we have to have with attacking gun violence. It's not just a gun's issue. It's not just mental health. It's not just systemic and structural factors. And it's not just retaliatory. It's all of the above. And that's something that we have to sit on in the evidence and say,

how do we attack those things simultaneously and utilize people who have the lived experiences and the expertise in each of those to walk chew gum at the same time? The same way I would have to. and the emergency department. And that's what we try to do here on Chicago, South Side, and Beyond is we try to have a model built out of the University of Chicago's

Adult Level 1 Trauma Center that I'm working at now that any community, whether they're rural, they could be on an Indian reservation. This could be in Appalachia that they could attack the same epidemic of firearms violence

by saying, what do our communities need? What are the factors from mental health, from youth and bullying to the guns that are, Some guns don't need to be out there that have, you know, extended clips and all those things, but attack them all individually at the same time. So one of the things that was fascinating to me as a reader is learning that we, you, have gotten better at treating gunshot wounds and trauma so that more people actually live and survive who are shot.

And that actually affects what the crime rate looks like, when in fact you're just saving more lives from the people who are committing the crime. I have a chapter of the book where I sit with a guy, actually you might know Dr. Pratt, a guy named Eddie Cornwall, who runs the trauma center at Howard University Hospital in D.C. probably has treated more gunshot wounds

than anyone else in the world because he worked in Baltimore, at Hopkins, and before that, USC in South Central during the crack epidemic. And he's in the 60s now. And his point was absolutely this, that the homicide rate is a function of two things. It's one, how much violence there is, but it's also how good are we at treating people who got shot. And we've gotten so good at treating people that many people who used to die are now living. And that's making it look like the violence is going down.

Violence isn't going down. The health care is getting better. That's a crucial point. Yeah. One of the things that Malcolm Gladwell does in his book, he tells the story of you having been raised and stayed in that community of how every time you have to confront someone in the emergency ward and have to tell them that they have lost a loved one. And you would said that you had to do that with people that you actually knew. What is that moment like for you? Because they see

you and it's like, oh, hi, hi, Dr. Pratt. Because they know you in the community and then you have to give that news. I mean, I can, you know, see it. as clearly as yesterday because sometimes these things happen day to day. I've recently had to do that, you know, just a month or so ago. But yes, it is devastating and humbling when, as you think that I'm a physician, I've, you know, I'm trying to help the problem. Life reminds you that you're not that different than anyone that comes from your community. That at any moment, I can get the call from someone at my own hospital if I'm not working,

or I'm actually there when I see a best friend, like, I mean a close best friend, the best friend you ever have in the world, right? And you now have to call their mother who now hears you and says, oh, I just saw you doing something great. I saw you with the children. They think that's what the call is about.

And then they go from the highest to highs to the lowest of lows when you say, well, no, no, this is about your son. This is about this person. And they now know my other side of what I do, and they instantly understand what that. next piece of news is going to be because this isn't unfamiliar.

Mothers watch on the news every day other mothers cry. Parents watch every day on the news. Someone say they want justice for their loved one. And I saw my own mother go through it and I've been there with so many of my friends as mothers who are like mothers to me as they've gone through it. And that's the fuel that keeps me going. Well, I read that not only did you lose your brother, but then the best friend who was like a brother to you, you ended up losing him too.

So we thank you. We thank you so much for your service. I pray that there will be a day, you know, when you will no longer have to teach fourth graders how to take care of gunshot wounds. And I think that this book is the beginning of opening this conversation for us to see, like, who we are and what we're doing to ourselves.

Thank you so much, Dr. Pratt, for joining us and for the work you're doing there in Chicago. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I remember texting you when I got to this part about the Second Amendment when you go taking us back to Virginia and the ratifying convention.

And one of the things Malcolm does in this book is make an argument about the historical relationship between the Second Amendment militias and slave patrols. And I had for sure, I hadn't thought of it that way before. What did you discover there? Yeah. There's a brilliant book written on this by a historian named Carl Bogus, which just, one of those books that just kind of,

I read it, was like, oh, my goodness, I had never thought about this. I thought of it that way before. So the second amendment to the Constitution, that's the gun rights amendment. That's the one everybody's holding on to. Everyone's holding on to. Everybody's holding on to it. With this clause about militias, because we need a militia right in this country,

and then comma, the right to bear her arm should not be infringed. And the question is, what are they talking about when they talk about militias? And when you talk to people who are in favor of gun rights now, they don't want to talk about the militia part. They want to say, no, no, no, no. What the founders were talking about was everyone's got to have a right on a gun. So what this guy, Bogus does as he goes back, and he looks at the debates people were having at the time the Constitution was being ratified. And he realizes that people in the South were terrified that if the Constitution was passed, they wouldn't be able to have slave patrols anymore.

Slave patrols were malicious. Groups of white men with guns who went around. Because remember in many parts of the South, slaves greatly outnumbered white people. In South Carolina or parts of Virginia, it could be 10 or 20 to 1. They're terrified that in the middle of the night their slaves are going to come and get them or rise up. So they have these armed patrols to keep the slaves down. John Brown them. Yeah.

And the Constitution comes along and they're like, wait a second, they're going to take away our militias. And they're just like, so the people in Virginia say, we're not voting for this constitutional. unless you put in an amendment that says we get to keep our militias. That's where the Second Amendment comes from. Because we need a militia to keep slaves down, the right of the people to own guns should not be infringed. We have removed this inconvenient fact from our historical understanding and made this out to be something entirely different.

No, it's about slavery. Everybody's made it out to be your right to bear arms, you know. But my thing is, what about those pioneers fighting off bears? and, you know, and wolves and the actual need for guns to do it at the time. And what about self-defense and distrust of the government and all those things? Those are part of the story. But remember, when the Supreme Court talks about the Second Amendment, they are squarely concerned with the language of that amendment

and what it was meant at the time it was drafted. When we have this discussion about why, almost alone among Western countries, we have such a kind of rigid attachment to gun rights, it is because of a misreading of the intent of the Second Amendment. So why does changing that historical image matter to your larger argument? Because once again, it's a reminder about how much slavery colors so many aspects of this country. You can't run from it. I know that so many people, like, I feel there is an impatient sometimes with many Americans

who are like, enough already. It was a long time ago. It's not relevant. You know what? Kind of is still relevant. because it fuels everything that has happened since. You still got vestiges of it in our Constitution. The Second Amendment is there

because the slave owners in the South were nervous about their slaves. Like, it's still living among us as institution. Well, okay, so all of you listening are watching. You have a quick exercise for us. I want to talk about this. This quick exercise for us where we rank cities, can you run us through that?

Yeah. So the broader, set up for this is that Americans fundamentally misunderstand that there is a difference between crime and violence. So this exercise is intended...

I'm an American who misunderstood that until I read this book. So question number one is if I give you a handful of cities, rank them according to what you think their homicide rate would be. Right. So Chicago, New York, Toronto, Paris,

London. Right. I think most of us get that ranking right. We would say Chicago's probably the most dangerous. New York 2nd, Toronto 3rd. Maybe Paris and London will be closed, but Paris 4, London 5. Right, right? Absolutely correct, right? Okay.

Now, let's do, let's rank those same cities, but this time let's use, let's just talk about crime. So everything other than violence, you know, robbery, various kinds of theft, stolen. cars, you know, all the kind of things that we... Break-ins. Break-ins. Let's do the same ranking. I think most of us would say, oh, well, Chicago's got a lot of crime probably is number one. I would have said Chicago, New York, top of the list.

Top of the list. No. I would have said New York, then Chicago. Well, that's because you're Chicago, you're Chicago Homer. Right. No. What's interesting is when we take violence out of the equation, the cities of the United States are not any more dangerous than in the cities of Europe.

Your car is far more likely to be stolen in London than it is in New York. Your house is much more likely to be broken into in Paris than it is Washington, D.C. Your pocket's more likely to be picked in Milan than it is in Boston. In other words, these things are crimes. Are crimes. We lump crime and violence together. They're different. Different people engage in violence and crimes for different reasons.

They have different, they attack communities in different ways. And our problem in this country is not crime. Our crime rates are the same as everywhere else. Our problem is violence. And until we are specific, yeah, that is one of the key, key learnings that I took away from the American way of killing, that our problem is not crime. These are a separate phenomenon. And we are confusing the two.

And politicians stand up and say, I want to get tough on crime. Let's be accurate here. No, we don't need you to get tough on crime. We need you to think seriously about violence. And there is a difference. And violence means there's always a gun or knife or some kind of violent act involved. We can be more specific than that. I've been spending a lot of time in Baltimore.

Yeah. Baltimore is the American city that has, over the last couple of years, been more successful than almost any other city in American history in lowering its homicide rate. They've gone from, they had 350 homicides three years ago. They could be under 100 this year. Do you know how it's astonishing that kind of decrease? And what are they doing differently?

What they're doing is exactly this. They are focusing in on violence and they're understanding what violence is. And Dr. Pratt is really good on this subject as well because he sees these kids come in. It's kids having arguments. It's feuds. It's cycles of retaliation and revenge. It's young people who lack. the means to deal with their anger and their grievances in a productive manner.

Yeah. And so what Baltimore does is they have people who, they look at a crime and they figure out who the friends and family are, and they go and see those people and they say, your brother just got shot. I know you're really angry. I know you post on social media. How are you going to get even? Don't.

Calm down. Let's talk to you. Let's get you a job. Let's, we're going to handle this. They're doing that on a personal basis, going out in the community, with. some combination of police officers, but also trusted community voices, pastors, counselors. I met a woman where there's a woman called Termite in Baltimore who knows everyone in Baltimore. And they use her.

She goes out and knocks on people's doors and says, I heard you're really upset because your stepdad hit your mom. She says, calm down. Don't be waving your gun around. She does, this is what she does on a day-to-day basis. That has succeeded in lowering their homicide rate from 350 people a year. to under 100. You make another distinction that I think many people

may have never considered, really. You talk about instrumental violence versus expressive violence. Talk about this. This is what I'm getting at here. That we think what a murder is is instrumental, meaning that it's part of some carefully planned

rational act. I'm trying to rob your house. You get in the way. I shoot you. I'm planning some big nefarious conspiracy to get something, and so I ended up killing someone along the way.

That's what you see on law and order. It's what you see in detective novels. That is not what happens in real life. In real life, murder is expressive overwhelmingly, meaning you get really angry and upset, and you happen to have a gun-handy, and you're not thinking straight, and you shoot someone in raid,

someone who you know, someone who you have a beef with. Overwhelmingly, that's what the American homicide problem is, and has always been. That's expressive. That is expressive. It's the two kids have a quarrel about a woman, and it spirals out of control, and one of them's drunk, and they end up shooting it. That's expressive violence. And so one of the things you say to is, you know, other places, other countries, people have arguments.

They have expressed themselves. They get just as upset as people in the United States. A lot of people in other countries don't know how to manage their emotions, but they don't have the kind of violence because they don't have the guns. Yeah. They settle their arguments with... simplest way to describe the difference between, you know, Germany and the United States, or England and the United States is, we settle our arguments with guns, they settle our arguments with knives and fists. And you are, you know, six times more likely to kill someone with a gun than a knife.

And so what are we to learn from everything that you have now researched and brought to us? I want to bring up Baltimore again because I've just been spending a lot of time talking to people. Baltimore, I also want to talk about the chapter on becoming a man. Yes. Yeah, okay. So let's talk about Baltimore. Those are part of the same kind of effort. People on the ground are beginning to realize that at the core of this is trying to teach young people how to manage their emotions.

Right. And to manage difficult situations. And that is a skill that you have to learn. And many of us in, you know, middle class Americans learn the skill as a matter of course. Right. It's really, really hard to learn that skill when you're growing up in an impoverished neighborhood. and you have to intervene and teach people that? I think most people who are not growing up in impoverished neighborhoods

don't understand that anger management and being able to manage just your emotions is a fundamental part of this issue of violence in America. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And that's what you've let us know in this book. I think about my kid is in kindergarten and public school in New York.

There are like 12 kids in the class. I don't know how many teachers. Four? I mean, if anyone has a kind of emotional outburst, there is an adult right there to set them straight and talk to them and teach them how to do it right. I mean, that's a classic example of, like, we do a really good job in this country

of teaching middle-class kids how to manage their anger. It's really hard in a neighborhood where there aren't those kinds of resources where you've got one parent who's working all the time, where you've got, where you're learning something very different on the streets. I mean, I could go on. And that was starting now to understand and attack that problem.

And that is, I think, holds the biggest sort of payoff for reducing violence. Yeah. So talk about the becoming a man chapter, the chapter on becoming a man, where you talk about the profound work being done in Chicago to help young men in particular process. I knew you would come back to Chicago. Yeah, I have to. It always comes back to Chicago. This is a program that was started about 15 years ago.

It's a year-long program, and they work with... teenage boys in South Side of Chicago and other parts of the city as well. And basically they're teaching them how to manage their emotions in difficult situations. They have drills, they have lessons. One of the most fun drills is

they have two kids and they're paired off and one kid has something in their hand and the other kid is given the instructions to find a way to get that thing from the other kid, right? And, you know, so they'll wrestle for it. It'll be inside, or they'll try and probably open their hand. And what they're trying to get them to realize is,

you could just ask for it, right? There's always a moment where they figure out, oh, I could just... Just ask for it. I could ask, cut nicely. Can you, you know, you've got a quarter in your hand. Do you mind giving that to me? That sounds really dumb and simple,

but what they've shown over the years is that this program has an enormously beneficial effect. It reduces the crime rates of the kids who are enrolled in the process. program by some extraordinary percentage. And I just want to, I'm thinking about people who are listening to us and, you know, a lot of people are always looking for ways for what charities to help or what, how to help in the community. This is an enormous way to make a difference in a community is by, you know, funding one of those

organizations helping these kids. Yeah, yeah. It's this move towards what's behind a lot of the most successful programs is the understanding that this is personal. is we have, you know, we've been doing population level crime control for a long time now, where you just go in and you arrest everyone you can. And what we know is that that does not work. It never worked.

It makes you worse off than you were before. What you need, you cannot arrest someone unless you know something about that person. You can't stop a crime unless you have a personal connection with them. And so the task, I think, is for us to reimagine our homicide prevention networks. on a personal basis, let's get to know who these kids are. Let's meet them where they are. Let's teach them something about how to be better citizens. You believe we're not learning from our mistakes.

You call this a moral hazard. Can you expand on that? Well, this was in the context when we were talking to Dr. Pratt about how good people like him have become in saving gunshot victims. And I think there's an unintended side effect of this. So there's a study that was done a couple years ago that said, if we kept the level of the quality of health care the same from 1960 onwards, how many murders will be have in this country?

The answer is we'd have 75,000 a year. We have right now 15 or 20,000. That's how many people, the difference between 75,000 and 15,000, is how many people are being saved by much better medical care, trauma centers like Dr. Pratt belongs to. And what that has done, people like him are so good now that they make it easy for people like you and I to ignore the problem.

And because we look at the raw numbers that are going down, we think, oh, it's getting better. You think the numbers are going down right now? But a big part of that is the quality of, is the fact that you walk into, you can get shot up really badly. And if you're close enough to a trauma center, they will save your life.

I mean, absent a shot to the head, it's astonishing what they do. So you have a better chance of surviving a severe gunshot wound in the United States, than you would in a place like anywhere else. Anywhere else. And that's a fantastic... Because of the number of cases,

particularly in a big city. In a big city. Yeah. But that has had this paradoxical effect of making it easy for the rest of us to ignore the problem. Well, the interesting thing about you, Malcolm, is that you spent your career literally, you know, finding explanation,

hiding in places that the rest of us didn't even know where to look. And what is it that you think specifically? Specifically, we are refusing to see about America's gun violence. Because everybody's arguing about the guns, you're never going to remove all the guns. You're never going to remove all the guns. So what is it we need to see in this moment? We need to see that we are right to try and reduce the number of guns in this country,

but we need to be clear-eyed about the fact that it's probably not going to happen anytime of the next 50 years. And if that's what your strategy is, then you're letting a lot of people die in the interim. The other thing I think we need to understand is we have to find some way of appreciating how perilous and tragic the situation is in the affected communities. I had a chat with the mayor of Baltimore, really, really interesting guy named Brendan Scott. He's lost 10 friends to gun violence. He's the mayor. The mayor of a major American city has lost 10 friends to gun violence.

We need some way to communicate what that means. and how pressing that problem is to people who have lost none. That is the core issue for me. Yeah, so you need to do like a film about this book. If you wanna do a film with me, Oprah, you just say the word. I think there now needs to be, we need to broaden the story to another platform

because I think what you're saying, you know, I came away with so many insights, but you know, if you could erase one widely held belief about violence from the American consciousness and replace it with one thing that you would want us to know for sure. What would that look like? What would that be?

Both the left and the right in this country make a mistake about gun violence, which is they assume that the right wing says it's all about bad people making bad decisions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The left says it's all about systemic problems, unemployment, crime, poverty, all those kinds of things. And the result, both of them think that this problem is really, really huge and deeply rooted. and so huge and deeply rooted that there's almost nothing you can do to change it. And I think that we have defined the problem

in such stark, overwhelming terms that we think it's pointless to do something about it. And I think the most important thing to understand is there is something you can do about it. The problem is not overwhelming. Unsolvable. Most people in bad neighborhoods are not bad.

Most people in bad neighborhoods are actually really, really good law-abiding people. I had a chat with a guy the University of Chicago, he did a study of the west side of Chicago, 50,000 people. He looked at all of the violent crimes. He tried to figure out how many people at any given time are seriously involved in violent crime on the west side of Chicago. Out of 50,000, he said it's 400. That's it.

It's 400 people, right? It's not 25,000. It's not 10,000. It's 400. Once you realize, oh, this problem is. concentrated. And look at the work in Baltimore. Look at the work being done in Baltimore. Look at the work being done in Chicago and your whole chapter about becoming a man. Look at the work. You know, it's a, it's a human-scale problem. Human-scaled problem. It's a human-scaled problem. Yeah. And it's about meeting, particularly,

these young boys, where they are in their lives right now. Yeah. And getting them to see another way of being and living in the world and particularly managing their emotions. Yeah. It goes back to the point we were saying at the beginning about the number of police officers. One of the reasons you want more people, they don't all have to be police. But one of the reasons you want more people is you want to have enough people involved in law enforcement, broadly understood, that they know the people who are involved in crime. That's right. And it is a knowable.

You want to, like there's a, they do something in Baltimore called the management meeting where everyone, 25 people meet every week. and they go through the violent crimes from the previous week. And the first question that has asked is, who knows this guy? It's a room full of like pastors and outreach workers and cops and somebody will waves their hands.

Oh, I know that guy's dad. Can you go and speak to the dad? Tell them their son's in trouble. Calm down. It's personal. Wow. But you need bodies and resources to establish those kinds of relations.

That's so profound because that's what communities used to do. Yeah. Right? That's what people used to do for each other. Yeah. Yeah. Back in the meeting that we had this whole thing, at the end of the meeting, some guy, an older man, says that exact thing.

He said, what we're doing is we're recreating what we had in Baltimore 50 years ago. Okay. I finished the book and I just thought, okay, so now I have a different perspective. I think everybody who finishes is going to have a different perspective. What do you want to actually happen? I mean, who do you most want to read this book? Do you want policies to change? Do you want people to vote differently, act differently?

What do you want to see happen because you wrote this book? What troubles me most about this issue, as with so many issues, is that it's become politicized. Yeah, polarized. Nothing. There is, this has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do with Democrats and Republicans. Nothing.

It's just about meeting people where they are and understanding who they are and getting at the roots of a, of, Bad powers today. Well, that is so profound because it is so politicized and so polarizing. Like the police chief I speak to who wants more cops, that's not a, he's not making, I don't even know whether he's a Democrat or Republican. It never came up. It's getting back to what the gentleman said in Baltimore.

It's like basic, you know, communities helping, joining in as a community to father, mentor the boys in that community to make a difference so that people begin to see possibility. in their lives that they didn't see before. Malcolm Gladwell, thank you again. Thank you for this book. And for yet again making me say, I never thought of it that way before. You do that over and over and over again.

So if you're looking for not just a great read, but a profound read to expand the way you think about guns and violence in America, the American way of killing is it. You do this on your fantastic podcast, too, revisionist history. You having fun with yourself? I've never had more fun.

I have that and my two little girls. I'm a good shape. You're two little fairy tale girls, gorgeous girls. Thank you, Dr. Pratt, also, and for joining us and all of you for listening. I hope you pick up a copy of the American Way of Killing, another profound book from the Malcolm Gladwell. Go well.

If like me, this conversation had you saying to yourself, I never thought of it that way before. You want to pick up your own copy of the American way of killing. Just scan the QR code there on your screen. Our listeners tell us that the podcast is resonating with you and is serving as a bright spot in your day. That means a lot to me. So here's the thing. I would really appreciate it if you like and subscribe to the Oprah podcast on YouTube or wherever you podcast. It's just a quick tap of the subscribe button. And that way, you won't miss an episode in your queue.

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