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The American Way of Killing: What Malcolm Gladwell Misses · The Book Brief Project

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  Speaker 1: There is a trauma surgeon in Baltimore who, near the
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  Speaker 1: end of a 35-year career, was asked how many gunshot
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  Speaker 1: patients he had operated on. The number he settled on
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  Speaker 1: was around 3,500. That figure would be unthinkable for a
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  Speaker 1: surgeon almost anywhere else in the rich world, and he
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  Speaker 1: offered it without drama, the way a carpenter might estimate
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  Speaker 1: how many doors he had hung. A new book builds
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  Speaker 1: its best pages around that man. Most people who read
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  Speaker 1: it will remember something else. The takedown of the assault
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  Speaker 1: weapons ban, or the history of the Second Amendment, the
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  Speaker 1: parts that sound most like a fight. Those parts will
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  Speaker 1: get the praise. I think the book's central claim is mistaken,
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  Speaker 1: and The Surgeon is the reason why. The book is
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  Speaker 1: The American Way of Killing by Malcolm Gladwell, out since
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  Speaker 1: late September and already a bestseller. Its premise, as the
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  Speaker 1: publisher puts it, is that America does not understand its
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  Speaker 1: most pressing social problem, and so it cannot fix it.
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  Speaker 1: Hold that premise, because the book's own evidence keeps leaning
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  Speaker 1: against it. If the country already knows what works, and
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  Speaker 1: the book is full of places where it worked, then
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  Speaker 1: the real puzzle is what lets America keep not doing it. Gladwell,
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  Speaker 1: of all people, has the answer to that. He files
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  Speaker 1: it under statistics. He has been circling crime for most
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  Speaker 1: of his career. The Tipping Point made part of its
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  Speaker 1: name on New York's collapse in crime during the 1990s,
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  Speaker 1: and Talking to Strangers was built around a traffic stop
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  Speaker 1: in Texas that ended with a woman dead in a
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  Speaker 1: jail cell. This book grew out of a run of
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  Speaker 1: episodes of his podcast, Revisionist History, and it reads that way,
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  Speaker 1: a chain of stories more than a single proof. What
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  Speaker 1: is new is the subject. For the first time, he's
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  Speaker 1: writing about the thing that makes American crime lethal rather
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  Speaker 1: than the thing that makes it common. And the whole
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  Speaker 1: book stands on that difference. He opens on the south
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  Speaker 1: side of Chicago with an emergency physician who grew up there,
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  Speaker 1: buried 15 close friends and an older brother. Every one
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  Speaker 1: of them shot and then went back to practice medicine
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  Speaker 1: in the same neighborhood. Gladwell's point is simple and hard
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  Speaker 1: to sit with. That biography is ordinary in parts of
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  Speaker 1: America and close to unimaginable anywhere else in the developed world.
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  Speaker 1: Elsewhere in the opening pages, he finds fourth graders being
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  Speaker 1: taught to pack a classmate's wound and reads it as
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  Speaker 1: a measure of how much has already been lost. His
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  Speaker 1: first move is to separate two things Americans habitually bundle together. Crime,
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  Speaker 1: in the ordinary sense, is not especially American. Robbery rates
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  Speaker 1: in Paris and London comfortably exceed Chicago's. What sets the
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  Speaker 1: United States apart is lethal violence, a homicide rate he
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  Speaker 1: puts at three to six times that of Western Europe.
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  Speaker 1: Robbery and murder, in his telling, are different animals with
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  Speaker 1: different causes, and policy aimed at crime in general keeps
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  Speaker 1: missing the thing that is actually killing people. Then he
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  Speaker 1: goes to a shooting range in North Carolina with a
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  Speaker 1: law professor who shoots competitively and defends gun rights, learns
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  Speaker 1: to hit a target, and lets the man talk at length.
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  Speaker 1: What comes out of that day is a dismantling of
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  Speaker 1: the assault weapons ban. The ban features are mostly about
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  Speaker 1: how a rifle looks, the grip and the stock and
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  Speaker 1: the shroud around the barrel. A recent Senate bill names
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  Speaker 1: the prohibited rifles across seven pages and then, in an appendix,
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  Speaker 1: lists the functionally identical rifles that would stay legal across 96.
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  Speaker 1: Gladwell calls the whole exercise theater. By one count, mass
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  Speaker 1: shootings killed around 1,300 people over more than half a century.
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  Speaker 1: Guns as a whole killed something like two million in
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  Speaker 1: the same stretch, and the weapon doing most of that
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  Speaker 1: work in mass shootings and everywhere else is the handgun.
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  Speaker 1: From the range, he travels back to 1739 to the
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  Speaker 1: Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, where enslaved men fought their
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  Speaker 1: way up a road for a day before an armed
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  Speaker 1: church congregation stopped them. The men who rode out that
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  Speaker 1: Sunday were a slave patrol, drawn from the militia. Gladwell
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  Speaker 1: argues that this fear is what Madison was answering 50
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  Speaker 1: years later when he drafted the Second Amendment. It's odd grammar,
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  Speaker 1: a clause about militias bolted on to a right to
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  Speaker 1: bear arms, was already old fashioned when Madison used it.
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  Speaker 1: In the Supreme Court, he says, has since read that
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  Speaker 1: first clause as a polite preamble and kept only the
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  Speaker 1: second half. He follows that reading into the 2022 decision
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  Speaker 1: that struck down a New York handgun permit law that
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  Speaker 1: had stood since 1911. One long study found that law
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  Speaker 1: had cut gun suicides by somewhere between a third and
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  Speaker 1: almost a half, with no rise in other methods. Australia,
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  Speaker 1: after its own massacre in 1996, rewrote its laws within weeks,
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  Speaker 1: and its highest court dismissed a nearly identical challenge in
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  Speaker 1: 24 minutes. The second half of the book is about diagnosis.
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  Speaker 1: Most American killings, Gladwell argues, are never planned. They are
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  Speaker 1: quarrels that escalate over money or an insult, and the
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  Speaker 1: records say the pattern is ancient, visible in medieval English
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  Speaker 1: coroner's roles and in modern Chicago alike, people lose their
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  Speaker 1: tempers everywhere. The American exception sits in the weapon within
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  Speaker 1: reach when they do. That has a consequence for punishment,
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  Speaker 1: because a long sentence deters only the person who stops
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  Speaker 1: to weigh it, and a man in a drunken argument
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  Speaker 1: at two in the morning is weighing nothing. So he
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  Speaker 1: turns to the police and says the thing most likely
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  Speaker 1: to annoy his own readers. America, by his account, is underpoliced, Berlin,
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  Speaker 1: a city roughly the size of Los Angeles, has about
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  Speaker 1: twice as many officers. The United States makes up for
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  Speaker 1: thin policing with extreme sentences, and the evidence he gathers
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  Speaker 1: says the certainty of being caught deters far better than
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  Speaker 1: the length of the punishment. He also cites research finding
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  Speaker 1: that the fewer officers a country has relative to its murders,
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  Speaker 1: the more civilians its police tend to kill, a pattern
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  Speaker 1: that puts the United States beside Brazil and Iran. He
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  Speaker 1: visits Tegel, a prison in Berlin designed to resemble ordinary
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  Speaker 1: life as closely as a prison can and holds it
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  Speaker 1: up as the standard American prisons have abandoned. It is
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  Speaker 1: a place where losing your freedom is the punishment and
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  Speaker 1: nothing is added on top. By this point, Gladwell has
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  Speaker 1: taken the assault rifle off the table and walked the
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  Speaker 1: Second Amendment back to the slave patrols. What he hasn't
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  Speaker 1: told you yet is that the number everyone argues over,
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  Speaker 1: the homicide rate itself, has been quietly misleading the whole conversation.
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  Speaker 1: Up to now, the book has been arguing about laws
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  Speaker 1: and words. The next idea is the one that should
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  Speaker 1: have held the entire structure up, and Gladwell treats it
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  Speaker 1: as a footnote to the data. Take Memphis. In 1935,
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  Speaker 1: the city recorded roughly 40 homicides for every 100,000 people.
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  Speaker 1: By 1985, that rate had halved, and anyone reading the
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  Speaker 1: local paper would have concluded that Memphis had calmed down.
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  Speaker 1: Over the same 50 years, serious assaults nearly doubled. More
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  Speaker 1: people were being attacked, and fewer of them were dying.
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  Speaker 1: The difference was medicine. American trauma care became extraordinary, and
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  Speaker 1: the reason nobody likes to say out loud is practice.
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  Speaker 1: The surgeon in Baltimore, with his three and a half
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  Speaker 1: thousand cases, is the product of a country that keeps
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  Speaker 1: sending him patients. Gladwell names the pattern after him, the
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  Speaker 1: Cornwell effect. A falling murder rate turns out to be
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  Speaker 1: partly the work of paramedics and operating rooms, and everybody
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  Speaker 1: else takes the credit. By his estimate, medical improvement alone
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  Speaker 1: has been cutting the death rate from wounds by up
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  Speaker 1: to 4% a year. He sharpens the point twice. Nobody
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  Speaker 1: in the federal government counts how many Americans are shot
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  Speaker 1: and survive. One criminologist had to count the cases by hand,
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  Speaker 1: city by city, and found roughly three non-fatal shootings for
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  Speaker 1: every fatal one. And survival depends on distance. The neighborhoods
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  Speaker 1: with the most gunfire often sit farthest from a top-level
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  Speaker 1: trauma center. And in Chicago, those neighborhoods are overwhelmingly black.
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  Speaker 1: The same bullet in the same part of the body
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  Speaker 1: can become an assault on one side of a city
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  Speaker 1: and a murder on the other, and the charge and
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  Speaker 1: the sentence follow the ambulance. The book closes in Dodge City, Kansas,
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  Speaker 1: the most famously lawless town in the American imagination, where
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  Speaker 1: tourists now pay to watch actors shoot each other in
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  Speaker 1: the street. The real town, in the 1870s, posted a
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  Speaker 1: sign at the bridge banning firearms, made visitors surrender their
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  Speaker 1: guns on arrival. find anyone caught carrying, and kept half
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  Speaker 1: a dozen officers on patrol. Killings fell to almost none.
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  Speaker 1: The phrase, get out of Dodge, Gladwell suggests, has buried
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  Speaker 1: that lesson for a century and a half. The Cornwell
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  Speaker 1: effect is the best idea in the book, and possibly
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  Speaker 1: the best Gladwell has had in years. It changes how
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  Speaker 1: you hear every number in the gun debate, including the
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  Speaker 1: ones he opens with. If American homicide is being held
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  Speaker 1: down by American surgeons, then the gap with Europe is
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  Speaker 1: wider than three to six times. and the violence underneath
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  Speaker 1: is worse than the body count admits. The weak parts
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  Speaker 1: are weak in a way that matters for this book
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  Speaker 1: in particular. The argument against the rifle leans on a
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  Speaker 1: single study of 232 autopsy reports, and it handles magazine capacity,
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  Speaker 1: the serious part of that debate. In a footnote, the
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  Speaker 1: history of the Second Amendment rests on one law professor's
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  Speaker 1: thesis and one linguist's analysis, both real work and both
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  Speaker 1: minority positions. And the book offers them a settled without
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  Speaker 1: a serious reply from the other side. In an ordinary polemic,
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  Speaker 1: that would be an ordinary flaw. In a book whose
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  Speaker 1: first charge against Americans is that they argue dishonestly about guns,
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  Speaker 1: it lands harder. But the larger problem is the frame.
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  Speaker 1: For 25 years, Gladwell's method has been to show you
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  Speaker 1: a hidden logic you didn't see. The method needs a
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  Speaker 1: reader who is missing something. And in this book, the
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  Speaker 1: evidence keeps saying that nobody is missing very much. A
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  Speaker 1: cattle town in Kansas worked out what to do in
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  Speaker 1: about 18 months. New York ran a working handgun law
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  Speaker 1: for more than a century. Australia changed course in a
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  Speaker 1: matter of weeks. None of that is hidden. It is
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  Speaker 1: history now. and a good deal of it is famous.
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  Speaker 1: What the book can't quite bring itself to say is
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  Speaker 1: that many Americans know all of this and have chosen anyway.
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  Speaker 1: For a large part of the country, the right to
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  Speaker 1: carry a gun is worth more than whatever a Dodge
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  Speaker 1: City Rule would save, and that is a position held
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  Speaker 1: with open eyes, not a misreading of the data. You
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  Speaker 1: can think it is the wrong choice. Gladwell plainly does.
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  Speaker 1: A book about honest conversation still owes that position the
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  Speaker 1: courtesy of being treated as a choice. Instead, it keeps
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  Speaker 1: getting filed under confusion or bad faith, which lets Gladwell
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  Speaker 1: stay in the register he does best, the revelation, and
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  Speaker 1: step around the one he does worst, the open disagreement
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  Speaker 1: over what a country values. The surgeon belongs in this
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  Speaker 1: argument more than Gladwell lets him. The book uses the
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  Speaker 1: Cornwell effect to correct a statistic. I think it answers
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  Speaker 1: the question his critics say he never answers, which is
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  Speaker 1: how a country tolerates this at all. In 1975, the
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  Speaker 1: economist Sam Peltzman argued that when cars were made safer,
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  Speaker 1: drivers became a little more reckless because the cost of
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  Speaker 1: a mistake had dropped. His finding is still disputed. The
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  Speaker 1: intuition behind it has lasted, and it fits here almost
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  Speaker 1: too well. A system that makes harm survivable also makes
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  Speaker 1: it easier to live with. America has built the finest
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  Speaker 1: machine in the world for surviving its own violence. It
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  Speaker 1: has trauma surgeons with thousands of cases behind them. And
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  Speaker 1: it now has those fourth graders in classrooms learning to
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  Speaker 1: press gauze into a wound so they can save the
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  Speaker 1: classmates sitting beside them. Every part of that machine is admirable.
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  Speaker 1: Taken together, it lowers the price most Americans feel for
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  Speaker 1: the choice the country has made. and it concentrates what
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  Speaker 1: remains of that price on a few neighborhoods and the
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  Speaker 1: families in them who bury 15 friends. Gladwell calls this
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  Speaker 1: moral hazard and moves on to the next story. It
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  Speaker 1: is the closest thing in his book to the answer
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  Speaker 1: the book is looking for. If this way of reading
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  Speaker 1: suits you, one book at a time, taken slowly and
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  Speaker 1: argued with, follow the Book Brief Project. The next one
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  Speaker 1: is already open on the Desk. So read it for
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  Speaker 1: the surgeon and for Dodge City, which between them are
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  Speaker 1: worth the price of the book. Read the rest with
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  Speaker 1: the same suspicion Gladwell asks you to bring to everyone else,
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  Speaker 1: because his best evidence points somewhere his method can't follow.
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  Speaker 1: The book wants to be a diagnosis. Its strongest pages
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  Speaker 1: read like a receipt. Gladwell wrote a book to tell
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  Speaker 1: America what it doesn't understand about its violence. The more
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  Speaker 1: useful book was hiding inside the story of one surgeon.
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  Speaker 1: The country made its choice a long time ago. The
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  Speaker 1: surgeons are the ones paying for it.