"Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence"

U. of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig's book boasts of "A New Idea" about the causes of shootings.

I’m starting to read U. of Chicago economist Jens Ludwig’s new book Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.

An immigrant from Germany at age 3, Ludwig is the Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab and has numerous other academic distinctions.

His ideas are fairly sensible, but Herr Professor Ludwig has an inflated idea notion of how original they are. He entitles his first chapter “A New Idea.”

His new idea is that the Right is wrong about gun violence because it’s not due to bad people doing bad things because they want money, and the Left is wrong because it’s not Jean Valjean-like victims of society doing bad things because they need money.

Instead,

Experts who study crime estimate that only something like 20 percent of gun violence is motivated by profit. An estimated 80 percent seem to be instead crimes of passion — including rage. They are arguments that could be defused, but aren’t, then end in tragedy because someone has a gun.

Indeed.

But is that “a new idea?”

Of course, that’s what I’ve been saying for, roughly, ever: out there, it’s not really like on The Wire where every crack dealer above the level of teen street retailer is the second coming of Don Corleone in strategic acumen.

In contrast, American gun homicides are mostly knuckleheads shooting other knuckleheads because they are angry or fearful at the moment and have access to a handgun. I wrote in my 2015 review of Los Angeles Times’ homicide reporter Jill Leovy’s book Ghettoside (which I suspect was originally entitled Ghettocide):

But much of the killing reflects knuckleheads being knuckleheads in a shoot-first environment. Murder is a way of life in these Hobbesian black slums, which remind Leovy of lawless tribes in the accounts of anthropologists. In Los Angeles:

The smallest ghettoside spat seemed to escalate to violence, as if absent law, people were left with no other means of bringing a dispute to a close. Debts and competition over goods and women — especially women — drove many killings. But insults, snitching, drunken antics, and the classic — unwanted party guests — also were common homicide motives. Small conflicts divided people into hostile camps and triggered lasting feuds. Every grudge seemed to harbor explosive potential. It would ignite when antagonists met by chance, gunfire erupting in streets or liquor stores.

I don’t see any mention of Leovy in Ludwig’s bibliography or index. (I don’t even see “Floyd, George” in the index, which is pretty striking for a 2025 book about gun violence following the insane surge of murders during the Racial Reckoning. In Ludwig’s Chicago, for instance, the all-time 24 hour record of 18 murders occurred on May 31, 2020, six days after the demise of St. George.)

Ludwig’s second theory is based on his observation that only half as many people get shot in the Southside neighbor of South Shore than in the adjacent, more inland neighborhood of Greater Grand Crossing. He implies that there can’t really be a difference in the quality of people in the two neighborhoods:

At first glance, Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore appear quite similar. They’re next-door communities in the same American city, mostly indistinguishable in their economic conditions and in the racial and ethnic makeup of the people who live there.

After the paywall, I will propose a more plausible theory than Ludwig’s based on my many visits to South Shore.