Malcolm Gladwell on “The American Way of Killing”
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What does Malcolm Gladwell identify as the core problem with how America measures gun violence?
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC and The New Yorker.
Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm kind of shocked to say it, but Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer at The New Yorker for 30 years. We got here at just about the same time. And in his reporting for us and in a shelf of bestselling books, Gladwell takes ideas from the social sciences and other fields and applies them to topics that most of us had never really thought about. You could almost call Malcolm Gladwell a genre unto himself. But we don't often think of Malcolm Gladwell tackling the news, writing about what's in the headlines every day. And that's exactly what he does in his new book. And I'll tell you, it's not easy to read. The book is called The American Way of Killing.
And Malcolm's subject is gun violence. He looks at the mass shootings, suicides, and vast numbers of deaths and injuries in this country. And I could rattle off the statistics, but by now, you know them only too well. One unbelievable data point. Firearms have been the leading cause of death among American children since 2020. We don't lead the world in gun deaths, but among the wealthy nations, we're an outlier and to a stunning degree. Malcolm Gladwell tries to understand why that is in his newest book. We spoke this week. It's good to see you again, David. It's been way too long. Your new book is about guns, gun control, or the lack of it, and so on. What are the origins of your interest? I always have suspected that some of it is the fact that you're Canadian and come from a place that doesn't have this madness.
Yes.
I think the longer I stay in America, the more baffled I am in some ways by it. I mean, a lot of this book is concerned with the question that the conversation about guns in this country is dishonest. And I use that word—I pick that word with great deliberation. What do you mean? What I mean is that it's not that it's wrong. It's that people aren't arguing about the things they should be arguing about. But I'll give you one that I spend a lot of time on in the book, and that is— This country is obsessed with homicide rates. And I have all chapter pointing out that that's the wrong thing to be obsessed with. It didn't tell you anything. Why? Because a homicide is a function of two things. It's how lethal your wounds were and also how quickly you got to the hospital.
If you were to shoot me here in the heart, I'd be at that hospital three blocks away in five minutes. I'm going to make it. if you do the exact same thing to me in the Hudson Valley where I live, I'm dead, right? The level of violence is the same in those first two instances. But in one case, I'm a homicide, and in one case, I'm not. And that has to do with my access to health care and a skilled doctor and such. And one of the things that has happened in America in the last 40 years is the level and quality of medical attention that's being given to gunshot victims has gotten so much better. that we have become blind to the extent of our violence. If we held the level of healthcare constant from 1960 on, we'd have 75,000 homicides a year in this country.
We have like 20,000 now, whatever it is. It's still
an enormous amount.
It's still an enormous amount, but what you need to talk about is how many times do people shoot each other? That's what you should be talking about. Don't talk about homicide.
Let's start with the beginning. The Second Amendment is one single sentence. A well-regulated militia, comma, Being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed. Period. Period. Why is it written like that? What was its original meaning? And why are we so... fatalistically attached to it.
Yeah. That sentence is written in a time closer to Shakespeare's time than our own. We don't write sentences like that anymore.
At what point historically does the intent change?
Why does Gladwell argue that focusing on homicide rates misses the real scale of gun violence?
The key guy here is this guy named Carl Bogus. It's a fantastic legal historian.
Again, a Gladwellian name, if I've ever heard one.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What does Malcolm Gladwell identify as the core problem with how America measures gun violence?
0:02–4:13
2
Why does Gladwell argue that focusing on homicide rates misses the real scale of gun violence?
4:13–13:37
3
How does the historical meaning of the Second Amendment shape today’s gun‑policy debate?
13:37–25:10
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The New Yorker Radio Hour
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