Are differences in American firearm homicide rates driven more by differences in places (as U. of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig implies in his new book Unforgiving Places, which New Yorker reviewer Malcolm Gladwell believes with his usual guileless fervency) or by differences in people?
Ludwig is getting a lot of enthusiastic press for his discovery that there are two adjacent neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago in which one, formerly fashionable South Shore on Lake Michigan, has only half the murder rate of the other, more inland Greater Grand Crossing. For example, The Atlantic writes:
The University of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig opens his forthcoming book, Unforgiving Places, by describing the neighboring places of Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore, both minutes away from the elite university where he teaches.
Ludwig’s argument begins by reframing the problem of gun violence away from the demoralizing story of American exceptionalism and toward the more granular variation that differs state by state, city by city, and yes, block by block.
“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,” Ludwig writes.
The Obama Library is under construction in Jackson Park just north of South Shore’s best sub-neighborhood, Jackson Park Highlands. As part of the Library’s grounds, the ex-President asked Tiger Woods to design a way to combine the 18 hole Jackson Park municipal golf course and the 9 hole South Shore municipal golf course into a super muny 18 worthy of hosting Chicago’s annual PGA Tour tournament. Tiger came up with this routing, with Lake Michigan menacing holes 14-17, which would wrap around the magnificent South Shore Culture Center, where Barack and Michelle were married.
But South Side golfers protested, not unreasonably, that they preferred their current 27 holes of cheap, easy golf to 18 holes of hard, expensive golf. So the Barack-Tiger golf plan has withered away.
In contrast to South Shore’s amenities, here’s Greater Grand Crossing:
“How, in a city and a country where guns are everywhere, does gun violence occur so unevenly—even across such short distances, in this case literally right across the street?”
South Shore has only half as many murders per capita as Greater Grand Crossing! Surely, this gap of 50% must be as large as the black and white gap in the U.S.! So all we have to do is figure out what makes South Shore less homicidal than Greater Grand Crossing and we can solve the race disparity problem!
In reality … something that Americans don’t grasp is how large are the racial disparities in gun violence. For example, here are firearm homicide death rates from the CDC for males in huge Cook County (Chicago and inner suburbs), Illinois:
Black men in the Chicago area die by gun homicides 57 times as often as Asian men, 54 times as often as white men, and, perhaps most interestingly, 6.7 times as often as Hispanic men, who are roughly similar in education and income.
Paywall here.
Those are really, really big racial gaps. They aren’t quite as huge if you look at all homicides instead of just firearm homicides, or if you include women as well as men among victims. But if you had accurate data on homicide perpetration rates, as well as the more completely documented homicide victimization rates that I’ve graphed, that would make the gaps somewhat worse.
Ludwig argues that it’s important to have eyes on the street, responsible grown-ups willing to intervene and calm things down when a dispute between two knuckleheads look like it might be headed toward violence. From an interview in The Atlantic:
Demsas: To give your model in layman’s terms: Gun violence and shootings happen because there’s a large availability of guns and because people are not interrupted in pulling those guns out in the midst of a heated moment. So as you point out in your book, the vast majority of shootings are happening in the course of an argument—not in a premeditated sense but in [the sense] that someone bumps you on the sidewalk, or they insult you, or something like that—and that violence, that shooting happens because there’s no one to step in and say, Hey. Let’s calm things down. Is that kind of the overview that you’re giving us?
Ludwig: Yeah. The highest-level version of this is: All of our policies have conceived of gun violence as a problem of System 2 slow thinking, when I think it’s, actually, mostly a problem of System 1 fast thinking.
And so for starters, we just need a big reorientation to understand differently what the problem actually is to be solved. And once you have that reorientation—once you sort of think of gun violence as a problem of not bad people unafraid of the criminal-justice system, not people in bad economic circumstances stealing to feed their families, but normal people making bad decisions in fraught, difficult, 10-minute windows—one thing that you start to do then is start to think about, How do I change the social environment so there are more people, more eyes on the street to sort of step in and interrupt? And the other thing that you start to think more seriously about is, like, How do I focus my social policies more on helping people understand their own minds better and anticipate what they’re going to do in these difficult 10-minute windows?
And, yeah, that makes a lot of sense … in, say, posh Lincoln Park where if two drunken Big Ten grads look about to get into a scuffle, they aren’t likely to be carrying illegal hand guns.
But on the South Side? No thanks.
My view is that what we know works from New York City’s experience: if the cops can trigger a culture change in which lowlifes start to leave their illegal handguns at home because now they are more afraid of the cops catching them with a gun than they are afraid of their enemies catching them without a gun, you can achieve decades of much lower rates of killings.
But short of doing that, well, asking civilians to be volunteer violence interruptors?
More generally speaking, social science would be more effective at ameliorating our problems if social scientists like Ludwig were allowed to mention things like IQ mattering a lot in school performance or blacks having a bad gun problem without endangering their careers. For example, from his interview with The Atlantic:
Demsas: Jens, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you once thought was great and ended up being only good on paper?
Ludwig: Great—so we launched a big research project with the superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools a couple of years ago. The huge priority of this superintendent was truancy. So Chicago used to have something like 150 truancy officers for its 600 schools in 1991, and with budget cuts, they got rid of all of them. And then you look at the data and, like, there are tons of kids who are missing three or four weeks of school a year.
And so you look at that, and the superintendent is like, This surely is a key reason that kids are not doing well in school. So Jon Guryan and I launched this big research project with CPS, and we worked really hard to try and figure out how to get kids to come to school more often, without the punitive whatever of truancy officers. With a bunch of partners, we managed to figure out a way to get kids to come back to school more often. And then we look at the data, and we see it does not boost their learning at all.
Demsas: Oh wow.
Ludwig: So weird, so counterintuitive. You would think, If you don’t go to school, you can’t learn. It’s super intuitive. And yet, you get kids to come to school more often, and they don’t learn.
Demsas: Wait. What’s going on? Doesn’t that kind of conflict with a lot of ed-policy research?
Ludwig: Yeah. So super weird, right? And so it was only very recently that Jon and I were looking at data right after the pandemic, and what you can see in the data is, for instance, if you look at eighth graders in Chicago, the average eighth grader in Chicago academically is like a sixth grader. And something like a third-ish of Chicago eighth graders academically are, like, closer to fourth graders.
Demsas: Wow.
Ludwig: And the eighth-grade teachers—their feet are being held to the fire to teach eighth-grade content. And so then you ask yourself, Why is it the case that sending a kid who, academically, is at the fourth-grade level to school to be taught eighth-grade content doesn’t improve their learning? Like, to ask the question is to answer it.
Demsas: So it’s like, basically, the kids who are missing a bunch of school are more likely to be the kids who are way behind in school. And so they’re going to benefit less from being in school.
Ludwig: Exactly.
Demsas: Oh wow. That’s a very depressing answer.
Ludwig: Yeah, we were confusing, you know, What is a cause, and what is effect? And so it seemed good on paper. Now we realize that there’s a very different underlying problem that we’re working hard to fix. But that’s my depressing answer to leave you with.
In other words, these kids have low IQs so you can’t teach them grade level lessons. You have to track them into remedial classes.
But you aren’t supposed to talk about IQ even though its hugely useful for organizing your thoughts about educability because it’s racist, so practically nobody knows this kind of obvious thing in 2025.
I never use the term 'low IQ' when talking about my unsuccessful university students. I prefer the technical term 'stupid'.
“Difficult, 10-minute windows” is one hell of a euphemism.
Surely, Ludwig doesn’t actually think that poor Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods would erupt into gun violence if not for the presence of these so-called “interrupters.” Not all populations are equally likely to find themselves in “difficult, 10-minute windows,” nor are they equally likely to mishandle them so that they escalate to homicide.
If you need to be told not to shoot someone over shoes, I don’t want you in my community *even if you don’t end up shooting someone over shoes.* Your poor judgment is a ticking time bomb.