Malcolm Gladwell thinks we’re having the wrong gun control debates

Brian Lehrer (0:05)

From WNYC, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast. It's Monday, September 28th.

Gun violence in America. Not a new conversation or topic by any stretch, right? But there's actually a bit of a pattern. Every time there's a mass shooting, it comes back into the spotlight, into the headlines. Democrats express mounting frustration and not being able to institute much meaningful gun control reform, and then it kind of peters out, right? The news cycle moves on. Well, we're going to talk to Malcolm Gladwell about this because he's got a new book coming out tomorrow, officially, called The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic, in which he argues that the conversation around gun violence in the US is misguided, that people focus too much on past shootings and not enough on the kind of violence, gun violence that disenfranchised communities see every day. To address that kind of violence, which makes up the vast majority of gun violence in the United States, he says the country needs more cops and more intervention programs, both of those, by focusing so narrowly on gun control as a prevention strategy, he argues, gun violence activists are losing sight of the big picture.

You might know Malcolm Gladwell because he's one of the most popular non-fiction writers of our time. He's written a whole range of bestselling books on social phenomena, including Blink, The Tipping Point and Outliers. That's one where he coined the idea that anybody can be an expert at something if they dedicate 10,000 hours of practice to it. You've heard that, that comes from Malcolm Gladwell. He was a New Yorker staff writer for so many years, and he also hosts the podcast, Revisionist History. Again, his new book, which comes out tomorrow, is called The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. Malcolm, thanks so much for coming on today. Always interesting to talk to you. Welcome back to WNYC.

Malcolm Gladwell (2:07)

Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer (2:09)

Well, let's start with the title, The American Way of Killing, The Invention of an Epidemic. Why do you call the gun violence epidemic an invention?

Malcolm Gladwell (2:19)

Well, I feel like it's not something that's inherent to America. I mean, if you look at our peer countries around the world in Western Europe or our neighbor to the North Canada, which are in almost every other way very similar to the United States, they have homicide rates that are a fraction of the United States. So we're clearly doing something peculiar and different that sets us apart from the normal way that developed 21st century Western democracies behave. So it seems like we're inventing something, right? It's not...

America wasn't born with this problem.

Brian Lehrer (2:59)

In the book, you say the conversation that the country tends to have around gun violence is dishonest. That's a strong accusation as opposed to kind of well-intentioned but misguided or something like that. Why dishonest?

Malcolm Gladwell (3:13)

Well, I use a dishonest very broadly. And what I mean by that is that we sort of...

We focus on things that... We pretend certain things are serious problems when they're not. And other things we focus on... We pretend certain ideas are solutions when they're actually not really a solution. We avoid conclusions when they're too difficult. I mean, each chapter of the book is a...

It takes a different aspect of the problem and shows how we've been fooling ourselves.

I have two chapters on the Supreme Court and the kind of absurd way that the Supreme Court passes down gun rights rulings. Or you mentioned in your intro, one of the arguments of the book is that we have too few police in America. And the reason I say that is very simple. If you could just compare North American cities with European counterparts, I'll use LA as an example. LA and Berlin are exactly the same size. Los Angeles has 8,500 police officers. Berlin has 18,000. And that's typical of the difference between American cities and European cities. If you talk to any American police chief, they will tell you they are radically understaffed compared to their peers across the ocean. Americans think the opposite. We think we're over-policed. Nothing could be further from the truth. That's to my mind, there's a level of dishonesty involved in that, an unwillingness to just look at the facts and draw reasonable conclusions. Instead, we have a kind of a conversation that's burdened with all kinds of fantasies about what we're doing.

Brian Lehrer (4:50)

Well, that's probably the most controversial part of your book.

I'll read an excerpt of your words. In 2020, an African-American man in Minneapolis named George Floyd was killed by a rogue police officer setting off an extraordinary wave of protests around the country over police brutality. The motto of the protesters was defund the police. If police were badly behaved, the thinking went it was because there were too many of them, unquote from your book. So there's a lot to unpack there. For one thing, many people would argue, no, this was not a rogue police officer. Police officers are not maybe doing things every day like that officer did or those officers did to George Floyd. But they're a function of something systemic, the way policing is done. Do you disagree with that?