Why Is America Different Than Every Other Country When It Comes to Guns?

Oprah Winfrey (0:00)

What is it that you think specifically we are refusing to see about America's gun violence?

Malcolm Gladwell (0:07)

Our problem in this country is not crime. Our problem is violence.

Oprah Winfrey (0:12)

You teach children as young as fourth grade how to treat gunshot wounds.

Malcolm Gladwell (0:18)

We've lost track in America of just how far out on a limb we are.

Oprah Winfrey (0:22)

And that's why so many people have called for defunding the police.

Malcolm Gladwell (0:26)

I think that's exactly backwards. I think the most important thing to understand is there is something you can do about it.

Oprah Winfrey (0:34)

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.

Malcolm Gladwell (1:19)

Glad to be here.

Oprah Winfrey (1:20)

I read this book in one sitting.

Malcolm Gladwell (1:22)

You were texting me.

Oprah Winfrey (1:23)

I was texting you while I was reading it.

Malcolm Gladwell (1:24)

I was getting like, why text is yes?

Oprah Winfrey (1:26)

Yeah, I don't know. Is that irritating when somebody-

Malcolm Gladwell (1:28)

Oh, no. I was like, look, he just texted me.

Oprah Winfrey (1:30)

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.

Malcolm Gladwell (1:49)

Well, I've been writing about it my whole career, in one way or another.

Oprah Winfrey (1:52)

In Blink?

Malcolm Gladwell (1:53)

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 introduction to the book, I grew up in rural Canada, and I was obsessed as a child with the United States, this place I'd never been to.

Oprah Winfrey (2:08)

Life Magazine. That was your picture of who we were, yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell (2:11)

And it seemed so exotic, so fascinating, so exciting, and I was struck by how dangerous it was. I would read Time Magazine every week as an eight-year-old, and there were all of these stories about people being killed. And in Canada in the 70s, that was an incredibly unusual thing.

Oprah Winfrey (2:29)

Literally a foreign concept. Yeah.

Malcolm Gladwell (2:32)

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.

Oprah Winfrey (2:39)

So your news stories in the evening on your local news in Canada were not about the number of people shot.

Malcolm Gladwell (2:45)

We didn't have a TV, believe it or not.

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, there's a whole lot of killing going on. And up here, there's not, and I didn't understand why.

Oprah Winfrey (3:18)

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?

Malcolm Gladwell (3:55)

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.