Gun violence, seemingly one of the most intractable problems of American life, is more solvable than we think. That’s the hopeful and surprising message of a new book by Jens Ludwig, the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and Pritzker Director of the University’s Crime Lab. In Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Ludwig brings together academic research and personal experience to make the case that many shootings are not as calculated as we’ve long assumed. Instead they stem from a common form of human interaction: conflict. Most shootings, Ludwig writes, are arguments that end in tragedy because someone has a gun. Yet he sees reason for hope in a series of inexpensive and often scalable policies, rooted in behavioral economics, that can prevent a surprisingly large share of shootings. This interview has been edited and condensed.

In the book you challenge much of the conventional wisdom on gun violence. How would you summarize that conventional wisdom, and what does it miss?

If you ask Americans what causes gun violence, most people will give one of two answers. A bunch of people will say, I think gun violence is due to morally bad people who are just not afraid of the criminal justice system. This leads them to conclude that the only thing you can do is disincentivize gun violence by threatening people with bigger sticks.

Other people will say, No, gun violence is actually due to economic desperation, so the only thing you can do is disincentivize gun violence by making the alternatives to crime better through jobs programs or social policy.

Both of those perspectives share an implicit assumption that before anybody pulls a trigger, they’re engaging in some sort of rational benefit-cost calculation.

Back when we started the Crime Lab, one of the lightbulb moments for me came when we sent my friend Harold Pollack [the Helen Ross Distinguished Service Professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the College] over to Chicago police headquarters. We said, “Harold, don’t come out until you’ve read every homicide case file that involves a victim or a shooter under 18.”

Harold came back and said, “These shootings are not what we think. It really looks like most of these shootings are arguments—arguments that go sideways and someone’s got a gun.”

That led us to look at more data. It turns out that this finding—that most homicides in America don’t stem from gang wars over drug-selling turf or robberies or any other economically motivated cause—is something that criminologists like former Law School professor Franklin Zimring [JD’67] had discovered as early as the 1960s. This is a fact we keep forgetting and so keep having to rediscover.

You point out in the book that although we tend to think of all the illegal behaviors that dominate the news as one thing—crime—they’re actually quite different. How?

Seeing the impact of gun violence on New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I went to college, at the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic in the late 1980s got me to think, “I would really like to work on crime.” But over time I realized that the word “crime” is about as helpful as the word “disease.” Are you talking about cancer? Sepsis? COVID-19? These are all radically different things with radically different causes and consequences and cures.

The same thing is true for the word “crime.” Car thefts and burglaries are driven by economic considerations. Murder is driven by heat-of-the-moment arguments. Jaywalking is driven by impatience. To say that these are all three versions of the same thing makes no sense from the perspective of understanding and solving the problem.

I’m trained as an economist, so I read the canonical paper by our beloved University of Chicago colleague, the late Gary Becker [AM’53, PhD’55], that says crime is rational behavior and incentives are the cure for the problem. I think that is totally right for property crime—which accounts for most crimes—but I don’t think that’s right for most gun violence, which accounts for most of the harm from crime that society experiences.

How else has your thinking about gun violence evolved?

I thought for a long time that the path out of the gun violence problem in the United States was through gun control. My research suggests that gun availability is an important part of the story, but after years of working on this I could see that it is going to be very, very difficult to change gun availability or nationwide gun regulation in the foreseeable future. The nearly 400 million guns in America are not going anywhere anytime soon.

What I’ve learned through our work at the Crime Lab with local nonprofits and government agencies is that gun violence equals guns plus violence. And if the gun environment isn’t going to change for the foreseeable future, the good news is that there’s a different margin we can push on. We can try to change the willingness of people to use these widely available guns to hurt others and start making progress on this terrible public health crisis sooner rather than later.

The argument I try to make in the book is really an argument of diversifying our policy approach to the problem: It is possible that gun politics might change rapidly in a totally unexpected way, but it seems like madness to me to bet only on that. I do not want to say that people should not be working on gun control. My argument is, let’s not only be thinking about gun control.

How do arguments become shootings? What’s going on?

I remember visiting the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center and hearing a staff member say that 80 percent of the kids wouldn’t be there if you could give them back 10 minutes of their lives.

Behavioral economics gives us a way to understand what people are doing in those 10-minute windows. [Psychologist] Daniel Kahneman has a wonderful book called Thinking, Fast and Slow [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011], which explains that our minds work in two different ways, of which we are aware of only one. There’s our slow-thinking, deliberate, rational self—Kahneman calls that System 2. It’s very powerful but mentally taxing, so we do as little of it as possible. And then our minds have developed another kind of fast, effortless, below-the-level-of-consciousness thinking that Kahneman calls System 1. We rely on System 1 to deal with routine things we do over and over again. We couldn’t live without those automatic responses, but the price we pay for fast and effortless thought is often in terms of accuracy. System 1 responses aren’t always perfectly accurate. System 1 responses, which are usually adaptive, can get overgeneralized and deployed in the wrong situation. That can lead to trouble for people in situations where the consequences of making a mistake are very high.

Many people assume gun violence, especially urban gun violence, is related to gangs. How true is that?

The people involved in gun violence in Chicago are disproportionately in gangs. That connection has led a lot of people to assume that the gun violence problem is like what they’ve seen in The Wire: It must be the result of some gang war over drug-selling turf. But while it’s true that lots of people involved in shootings are gang involved, it doesn’t seem to be true that the motivation for most shootings is to further some organizational objective of the gang.

I saw this firsthand a few years ago going around with a detective on the South Side. I asked him about the most recent case he’d worked on, and he described it to me: Kid in Gang A gets off the CTA train and is walking down the sidewalk and steps on the sneaker of kid in Gang B. Kid in Gang B says, “I think you should apologize.” Kid in Gang A says, “I don’t feel like apologizing.” Somebody ends up dead. It is true that the kids are in opposite gangs, but it’s also clear, once you understand the event, that gang affiliation is incidental to the underlying cause, which is, I stepped on your shoe and called you a motherfucker instead of apologizing.

If you think of gun violence as gang wars over drug-selling turf, you think, “How in the world do we solve this?” But if instead you realize it’s one kid stepping on another kid’s sneaker, that feels much more like something we could do something about.

You write in the book about the importance of bystanders who can interrupt arguments before they become shootings—what the urbanist Jane Jacobs called “eyes upon the street.” Why does this matter so much?

In Hyde Park, the University of Chicago has unarmed private security guards in blue or neon yellow jackets on many street corners, plus a bunch of University of Chicago police cars driving around all the time.

In the book I tell a horrifyingly embarrassing story about me getting into an argument with a neighbor. I was saved by a private security guard driving around, who said, “Is everything all right? Or do I need to call a cop?”

That’s an example of what Jane Jacobs meant about “eyes upon the street”—some prosocial adult who is willing to step in and de-escalate conflict. Under the conventional wisdom that shootings stem from deliberate weighing of pros and cons, eyes upon the street shouldn’t matter—if you are strongly motivated toward gun violence, you’ll just wait for the eyes upon the street to go around the corner. It’s only the behavioral economics perspective that helps you understand how the motivation for the most serious crime there is could be so surprisingly fleeting, and why violence interrupted isn’t just violence delayed—it’s violence prevented.

If we look at gun violence through this new framework—as bad decisions in stressful situations—what role should police have in preventing it?

You can see in the data that when you put more police out on the street, crime goes down and arrests go down. The police are doing something preventive. But what is it? People have implicitly assumed it must be deterrence, but this book argues that cops can be eyes on the street too.

I spent a lot of time going around with the Chicago police, trying to understand what policing and gun violence look like in a complicated city. When a Chicago cop makes an arrest, it can take one or two or three hours to process. So if that cop has an eight-hour shift, all of a sudden, you’ve taken that cop off the street for a long time.

Especially for low-level misdemeanor arrests, the public safety benefit is not very great, and it can really lead somebody’s life to go sideways, because now they’re enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

In contrast, this book suggests that you want cops to make arrests when they really need to, but not for their own sake, and mostly to be out on the street, de-escalating conflict when it happens. I’ve seen a lot of examples of cops basically being eyes upon the street and stepping in and de-conflicting things without making an arrest in a moment when nobody other than a cop would really be willing or able to step in.

You also talk about youth intervention programs—including some the Crime Lab has been involved with—designed to help with de-escalation. How do those programs work?

I think of these really as decision-making programs. Who would benefit from better decision-making? You, me, and literally everybody I know or have ever met.

Most of us learn things largely through trial and error. There are a lot of things that you can learn in life through trial and error, but if you are a 16-year-old kid growing up in Englewood, trial and error is a very, very difficult way to learn to navigate your neighborhood, given the consequences of making a mistake in that setting. These programs are giving kids opportunities to go through simulated situations where they can learn, through trial and error, more about how their minds work and more about how to avoid common decision-making pitfalls in settings that don’t have the high stakes of real life. And the evidence suggests these programs can really help.

One of the reasons I’m so bullish on this way of addressing the problem is that there are ways to deliver these sorts of programs at really low cost, which is so important from the perspective of public policy, given that the City of Chicago—like so many other cities around the country right now—is in a disastrous budget situation. Gun violence is the number one problem for Chicago, and the city has no money to solve it. What do you do?

We did one study a few years ago in partnership with a juvenile detention center. A new administrator had come in, and he didn’t have any money to do any programming. The kids would go to school in the morning, and in the afternoon they would sit around watching TV while a guard stood against the wall, watching the kids watch TV.

So the juvenile detention center trained the guards to deliver one of these decision-making programs to the kids. It was practically free. The costs were mimeographing the booklets and a week of training for the guards. When we studied the effects, we saw a 20 percent reduction in recidivism by these kids who are at really high risk for violence involvement. That is a free win.

There have been criticisms of some of these decision-making programs from people who argue that we’re essentially treating Black and Brown boys like a problem that needs to be fixed. What do you think of those criticisms?

One of the reasons I tell so many stories about myself in the book is that I’m really trying to underscore the idea that this is not about any particular person or group of people. Everybody has a slow-thinking System 2 self and a fast-thinking System 1 self. What differs is the situations in which we find ourselves and the consequences of making a fast-thinking mistake in those situations.

You can see this looking at young people across the country. When you look at causes of death, homicide is disproportionately the problem for adolescents in low-income minority communities. But in other communities, you see that the leading causes of death for teens are suicide, drug overdoses, and car crashes, which share a lot of the same underlying causes.

It’s a universal problem. But the form it takes depends on the neighborhoods we’re talking about. That suggests the potential value of universal solutions.

When I was in high school, the State of New Jersey, in its infinite wisdom, made me take four years of health class, where they taught me that I should be eating more broccoli, getting more sleep, avoiding alcohol, and telling me where babies come from. This is what we learned during the day. At night, we would go out on the golf course and drink beer and stay out late, and every once in a while someone would think it was a good idea to get in their car and drive 90 miles an hour while somebody else was clinging onto the roof.

These sorts of decision-making programs only take something like 15 to 20 hours to have an impact. Why are we not capturing two or three weeks of every health class in every school across the country, rich neighborhoods, poor neighborhoods, rural neighborhoods, urban neighborhoods, suburban neighborhoods? We can save a bunch of young peoples’ lives.

Who do you hope will read this book?

One audience is policymakers. I’ve been working at the Crime Lab for 18 years now, and I’ve spent a lot of time talking to people in local, state, and federal government who want to do the right thing and make the world better. They just don’t know what the right thing to do is. Very little public policy has any evidence behind it. I hope what this book does, for starters, is communicate that there are a bunch of evidence-based things you can do about one of the most important and seemingly intractable public policy and public health problems in America.

I realize that American politics are complicated in different ways across different places. The right policy in Chicago is different from the right policy in Texas. I do not have an ideological axe to grind. And what I try to say in the book is, Depending on the local politics in your city, here’s a menu of things that you can try. I really don’t care what you pick. Just please pick something that will save lives. That’s the spirit of this work.

The second audience is the public, who could easily be forgiven for concluding that the problem of gun violence in America is hopeless. It’s a never-ending stream of heartbreaking stories in the news. I hope the book convinces people that they shouldn’t give up. There really is hope.