In the 2022 BBC show Inside Man, Stanley Tucci’s character (Jefferson Grieff), an inmate on death row, says something dramatic about murder: “There are moments that make murderers of us all… all it takes is a good reason and a bad day.”

In Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, University of Chicago Professor Jens Ludwig, goes further. He reduces that bad day to single ten-minute windows — and does away with much of the “good reason” part. 

America’s gun violence is, as he puts it, the outcome of a simple formula: guns + violence. 

We all come to the question of America’s gun violence, mass shootings and assaults, with implicit or preconceived notions — all too often lined up with our political or ideological priors. Ludwig summarizes the two major stories as bad people versus bad social or economic conditions. Those two stories, roughly corresponding to the political positions of those on the Right and the Left, don’t account for the real-life gun violence.

Ludwig painstakingly assesses the statistics he reports. Channeling his best H.L. Mencken (“For every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple, and wrong”), Ludwig explains that it’s not — like the Right thinks  — that there bad people pathologically out for blood; and it’s not — like the Left thinks — good people in bad circumstances (racism, poverty, oppression, deprivation) forced into crime by the lack of any other choice.

The most obvious anomalies have to do with large gun presence in some places; Switzerland or Finland (even Canada!) have plenty of guns but few murders, while the UK has almost no guns but an abundance of murders. Ludwig limits the scope to his own home turf and the typical analytical approach of randomized control trials, by looking across two neighborhoods in Chicago — South Shore and Greater Grand Crossing. 

Right off the bat, in the preface, Ludwig lays out the empirical anomaly that blows apart what almost everyone thinks they know about guns in America: 

The two neighborhoods are dramatically different in one important respect: On a per-capita basis, there are about twice as many shootings in Greater Grand Crossing as in South Shore. Whatever you believe about the causes of gun violence in America, those beliefs almost surely fail to explain why Greater Grand Crossing would be so much more of a violent place than South Shore.

Same gun laws and access to guns, same court system, same socioeconomic conditions, same racism and police (brutality), same segregation; thus: “the policy variables that we think of as determining public safety are identical in both places.” 

He observes that more shootings and gun murders take place when it’s warmer outside, at night, and on weekends and holidays. Does a person’s fundamental moral character, or the extent to which they experience poverty (…or racism or oppression) shift that much?

Ludwig advances a different story: “Most homicides are arguments that end in tragedy, usually because someone has a gun.” Exaggerating only a little here, we can therefore all become murderers. Ludwig argues that anyone, at any moment, can fall into the System 1–type catastrophizing, or misconstruing of social situations, that escalate a conflict into homicide. He relays personal anecdotes of everyday disputes with neighbors or fellow drivers that could, in the presence of guns, very well have ended in disaster. 

People just spur-of-the-moment kill each other; gun violence is gun plus violence. 

Instead of getting bogged down in counting the number of guns in America or comparing changes in legal guns, he asks a more fruitful question: is there a theory that can weave itself between these puzzling facts?

Analytically, then, Ludwig cleverly hones in on economics’ own rationality postulate. Specifically, he takes Gary Becker to task for thinking that murder (and other violent crimes) are the outcomes of cold, calculating, utility-optimizers. People don’t always (or often), per the line from Inside Man, murder one another for good reasons. He accounts for plenty of examples over turf, social status, or robberies gone wrong. Sometimes the expected financial payoff to the murderer is: heads, I go to jail for life; tails, I get away with $300 worth of goods. 

You’d need some pretty insane, risk-loving indifference curves to make rational sense of those decisions (or you’d have to really like violence, really like prison, or really like those goods). 

If the rest of us can disrupt or change those critical ten-minute windows where conflict escalates into violence, and violence — via America’s outsized presence of guns — escalates into shootings, we can greatly reduce the frequency of homicides in America: “Violence interrupted can often be violence prevented.”

The story Ludwig paints is one of cognitive bandwidth, of occasional circumstances that can be calmed down by others around us; in short, physical places that are more forgiving to our very human (innocent?) shortcomings. People under stress — financial, social, moral — are more likely to react instinctively, less able to override their own System 1 steering them toward catastrophe. 

That’s the practical and statistical difference between the two Chicago neighborhoods too: South Shore has more “liveliness” than Greater Grand Crossing — more densely populated, more businesses per square mile, more commercial land use, more residential housing, and more residents per square mile:

While the neighborhoods are socio-demographically similar today, the legacy of their built environment creates different conditions for liveliness and eyes on the street.

Ludwig’s explanation is brimming with paternalism, exactly Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman’s main objection to the whole field of behavioral economics in Escaping Paternalism Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy. While the word “economics” is in the subfield, there is very little “economics” (properly speaking) involved in Unforgiving Places. This is a sociological study, drawing on — at best — plenty of statistically focused randomized control trials and some questionable results from the field of psychology. 

The best evidence he brings to the table is precisely these small-scale, scattered randomized control trials of different kinds of social-level interventions that interrupt violence mid-air. The shockingly large effect sizes (20-60 percent reductions in gun violence), make my alarm bells go off — à la The Quick Fix, Jesse Singal’s take-down of much psychological “research.”

The most compelling bits are the anecdotal stories, surrounded by Ludwig’s lengthy and well-described account of Jane Jacobs’ research on cities — the “eyes-on-the-street” lens through which she assessed crime and other social outcomes in Death and Life of Great American Cities. When people live, work, go to school, and operate stores on the same streets, there are always trusted community “eyes” watching out for mischief. When there’s an altercation, there are eyes peeking out of from second-floor windows; when others in the neighborhood start fighting, the butcher, the schoolteacher, the security guard, the police officer, or the social worker that happened to be around can step in and ask the very obvious and calming questions: What are we really angry about? Take a walk and get your outrage under control. 

Interrupting violence is key. Because the source of (gun) violence isn’t a deep-seated moral failure or even desperation, but a momentary state of mind: “violence interrupted can often be violence prevented.”

Even though Ludwig works hard to bring supporting evidence to his story — threading his psychology-based explanation through the myriad of confusion and contradictory data surrounding guns, gun laws, and violence — the result is very… unsatisfactory. Not bad, not necessarily wrong, but unsatisfactory, located somewhere in the la-la-land of human behavior and social psychology. 

The book’s central message is that people kill each other on a whim. Specifically over misunderstandings or small, everyday altercations that escalate into conflict and are made so much worse by the immediate presence of guns.

Perhaps that’s right, perhaps it’s all a distraction, but it’s definitely a refreshing take on America’s most pernicious social problem.