This special WhoWhatWhy podcast comes on the heels of a grim weekend: a mass shooting, a school shooting, and a case of family violence that didn’t involve a gun at all, but a knife. Different weapons. Different settings. The same unsettling question: Why do ordinary conflicts so often turn lethal?

Our guest, University of Chicago professor and author of Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence, Jens Ludwig offers an answer that cuts across ideology and headlines. Most shootings, he says, aren’t driven by long-term criminal intent, ideology, or even desperation. They grow out of what he calls “garden-variety arguments” — moments of anger, fear, or humiliation that spiral out of control within brief, emotionally charged 10-minute windows. In those moments, people don’t deliberate; they react.

Ludwig applies behavioral economics to understand why violence clusters in certain neighborhoods and situations — and why traditional responses so often miss the mark. 

At a time when violence feels omnipresent and unsolvable, Ludwig offers something rare: clarity, evidence, and a path forward that doesn’t require political consensus. Ludwig points to data-driven interventions that work right now: improving physical environments, increasing “eyes on the street,” deploying violence interrupters, and teaching impulse-management skills before conflicts erupt. The goal isn’t to fix human nature — but to make communities more forgiving when human nature predictably falters.

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:15] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schectman. Gun violence, perhaps America’s most persistent and misunderstood crisis, often appears through the distorted lens of headlines, statistics, and polarizing politics.

Conservatives argue that tougher sentencing is the answer. Liberals say tackle poverty and racism first. Others insist that the solution lies solely in removing guns from the equation, transforming every debate into a standoff over the Second Amendment, drowning out any deeper understanding.

But what if these arguments are missing the fundamental point? What if our greatest misunderstandings about violence come from focusing on motives rather than moments?

Economist Jens Ludwig, who heads the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, offers an entirely different narrative: one grounded not in ideology, but in rigorous street-level evidence. In his compelling new book, Unforgiving Places, Ludwig reveals gun violence as not merely a consequence of systemic failure or hardened criminality or easy gun access but as a breakdown occurring within fleeting explosive encounters in what he calls the critical 10-minute window, when life-changing decisions unfold tragically fast.

Ludwig’s groundbreaking research reframes gun violence as a behavioral challenge solvable not just by political dogfights over gun ownership but through interventions that precisely target the triggers of human impulsivity.

Jens Ludwig is a professor at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy and the director of the university’s acclaimed Crime Lab and a leading voice at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He has dedicated decades to unpacking the complexities of crime and violence drawing from years immersed in Chicago’s most impacted neighborhoods. It is my pleasure to welcome Jens Ludwig here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast to talk about Unforgiving Places,: the Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. Jens, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:02:25] Jens Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

[00:02:27] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is a delight to have you here. Given how hardened people’s attitudes are about gun violence and the reasons for it, how difficult has it been, first of all, in a general context, to get people to look at different approaches and different possibilities as to what’s really at the core of what’s happening?

[00:02:48] Jens Ludwig: Yes, I think this is something that everybody has deeply held intuition on, and  maybe that’s one of the reasons why it’s been hard to make progress. As you noted, when you look at survey data, most Americans think this problem is due to some combination of inadequate gun laws, morally bad people who aren’t afraid of the criminal justice system, or economically desperate people doing whatever it takes to feed themselves and their families.

And that’s been a set of conversations that we’ve been having over and over again for a hundred years. And over that time period, we basically haven’t made any progress.

The murder rate that you see in the United States today, the majority of which are committed with guns, is almost the same today as it was back in 1900. And so I think one of the key next steps to progress is to just reframe the problem and see it differently and more accurately.

[00:03:47] Jeff Schechtman: And to that point, talk a little bit about your approach and what your research has shown in terms of this notion of behavior being at the core.

[00:04:00] Jens Ludwig: Yes, I think one of the key insights here was as we looked at the problem more and more, it became clear that criminal behavior, even violent criminal behavior, is a lot more like normal human behavior than I think we’ve appreciated.

I was inside the Juvenile Detention Center in Chicago several years ago, and one of the staff leaders said to us, “I tell most of the kids in here: ‘If I could give you back just 10 minutes of your lives, none of you would be here.’” And I think that that’s a very powerful reframing of the problem of gun violence and what to do about it.

The conventional wisdom of the left and the right that the problem is due to either morally bad people or bad economic conditions shares an implicit assumption that gun violence is really a problem of incentives — that before anybody ever pulls a trigger, they’re weighing the pros and cons, and so that would lead you to think that the key solution is to just threaten people with bigger sticks or offer them bigger carrots, and that’s a way to change their behavior.

But if you think about… The overwhelming majority of shootings in America turn out to be garden variety of arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone’s got a gun. And I think that’s what the juvenile detention staff leader meant when he talked about these 10-minute windows that kids would very quickly regret.

And that’s not the sort of moment when any of us are really deliberating and comparing pros and cons. And that helps us understand why the gun violence problem hasn’t responded to incentives as we had hoped, and why we just need a radically different approach.

[00:05:45] Jeff Schechtman: And I guess one of the issues that makes it more complex in terms of people’s understanding of it is the idea that this is really relevant to gun violence — to the impulsivity that results in a shooting and that makes it different than other discussions about criminality.

[00:06:05] Jens Ludwig: I do think, I think the term… I think part of what has maybe hung us up a little bit in these conversations in the United States, and maybe not just in the United States, is the word “crime” is an unhelpfully broad umbrella term that captures underneath it lots of very different types of things.

So the question of what to do about crime is a little bit like asking what to do about disease. But the answer is it depends a lot on what disease we’re talking about. Are we talking about cancer or pneumonia or COVID-19 or sepsis or something else? And so I think when we think about what determines what to do about crime, we need to think about that the same way. It turns out that property crime does seem to be very much something where people are deliberating and comparing the pros and cons before they act.

We have lots of evidence to suggest that. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of gun violence is not that: it’s arguments. And that turns out to be, the data suggests, something where incentives are much less important than with property crime. And it turns out that the overwhelming majority of crimes in the United States are property crimes. And so it could be that people have the wrong idea about violent crime because they’re overgeneralizing from property crime, which is most crime.

[00:07:38] Jeff Schechtman: It’s also much more difficult to think about how to deal with impulsivity and the way that results in gun violence. It’s much more difficult to get your head around in terms of potential solutions, it seems.

[00:07:53] Jens Ludwig: Yes and no in the following sense. So there was a wonderful book that came out — I’m trying to do the math in my head: maybe 60-something years ago — by the urban planner Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she was living on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village.

And she noticed that, among similarly poor neighborhoods in Manhattan, there were wildly different rates of crime and violence that you would see in these communities. And she attributed that to differences across neighborhoods in what she called eyes on the street.

And what she meant by that is the presence or absence of pro-social adults who are willing to sort of step in and help deescalate things before they turn into violence. And notice that could be police; it could be neighbors; it could be a coach or a shopkeeper.

More and more cities now are hiring nonprofit groups to put what are called violence interrupters out on the street to try and mediate conflict. There are many, many different types of people who could play that role. I want to point out that the whole idea that eyes on the street might matter makes absolutely no sense under conventional wisdom.

Because if you’re a morally bad person, and you are committed to engaging in violence because you’re a psychopath, or you’re economically desperate, and you’re doing whatever it takes to feed yourself and your family, if there’s an eye on the street who steps in and tries to deescalate and prevent you from engaging in whatever you’re about to do, you’re just going to wait until that person turns the corner, and then you’re going to go ahead and find another opportunity to engage in violence.

Which is to say, conventional wisdom would make you think that the motivation for gun violence is persistent. So long as the root cause is there, the motivation is there. And it’s new ideas from behavioral economics and behavioral science that start to help us understand why the motivation for even the most serious types of violence, like gun violence, are actually much more fleeting than we would expect, consistent with the 10-minute window.

And the answer there, I think, connects to something that Danny Kahneman — the genius psychologist — wrote in his wonderful book Thinking Fast and Slow about how all of our minds engage in two types of thinking. Slow thinking, which is a deliberate voice in our head that we’re all aware of, and fast thinking that happens below the level of consciousness. It’s a series of automatic responses that we don’t even know are happening that are designed to deal with things that we see over and over again.

They usually work well, but they can get us into trouble when they’re overgeneralized. And I think the behavioral economics perspective on gun violence says, “It’s much more driven by fast thinking than we had appreciated.” And eyes on the street — that sort of fast thinking behavioral economics perspective gives us a way to understand why Jane Jacobs was right about the importance of eyes on the street.

And connecting this now back to your question, the good news is we do know a lot about how to get eyes on the street and how to make that happen. And that leads to a bunch of policies that turn out to be very feasible, don’t take much money, and can really move the needle on the gun violence problem.

[00:11:27] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about that, because on the one hand, it seems that taking this behavioral economics approach, this individual approach to the causes of gun violence, makes it seem like it’s very difficult to scale with respect to solutions because it is so individualized.

[00:11:45] Jens Ludwig: Yes, I mean, I think there are individualized programs to help people to change what people bring with them into these 10-minute windows. And I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about that.

But let me let me just stick with the eyes on the street for the moment. I think you’re right to worry about the scaling problem because that turns out to be where so many public policies fall down. They can work well in little pilot demonstrations, and they fall apart when you try and scale them.

The good news is that there are a lot of things that cities do that shape eyes on the street that are super scalable. For instance, city zoning decisions turn out to be really important or the presence or absence of whether there are stores and restaurants and whatever interspersed with residential housing: houses, apartment buildings, whatever.

And the reason that that’s so important for eyes on the street, as Jane Jacobs was noting 60 years ago, is when there’s commercial interspersed with residential, that draws people out of their homes. So there are more people out in public who can step in and deescalate things.

Zoning is something that cities do at scale. Unfortunately, they do it not always optimally, which is part of the whole point of the abundance agenda. Let me give you two other quick examples.

There’s amazing research out of the University of Pennsylvania that shows that all sorts of other changes to the built environment can matter a surprisingly large amount for gun violence. So they worked with the city of Philadelphia to randomly select some vacant lots in Philly to clean up and turn into very uninviting places — essentially, pocket parks. So you can see that the result was to draw people out of their homes into public places. And you can see in low-income neighborhoods, the result of that was in turn to reduce shootings by 10, 20, even 30%. These are not small changes. These are impressively large changes in the vicinity around the park.

Let me give you a third example. Every city spends hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, on professional eyes on the street in the form of police and, increasingly, nonprofit violence interrupters. And yet we do a terrible job, for the most part, in our cities, capitalizing on the fact that there’s a ton of predictable structure to when and where gun violence happens.

There’s a lot of predictability to that. And data would let us get a lot more gun violence prevention out of the money that we’re spending on those professional eyes on the street, if we just use that data to target and put people when and where gun violence is most likely to happen. And that also is a super scalable thing because data and statistical models and data driven management practices scale much, much better than social programs.

[00:14:44] Jeff Schechtman: Because gun violence under this behavioral economics approach is so individualized, how is it predictable that it is going to happen in certain neighborhoods as opposed to others?

[00:14:57] Jens Ludwig: Yes, great question. Let me give you an example from my hometown of Chicago. There’s a liquor store on the south side that is open until midnight. Almost every other liquor store on the south side closes by 10 p.m.

So night after night, up until 10 p.m., everybody’s going to their local liquor store, and they are buying their booze. They’re getting liquored up until 10 p.m. 10 o’clock comes, and there’s a bunch of people who still want more alcohol. They all converge now from all over the south side to this one liquor store that’s up. There’s only one place open between 10 and midnight.

And so somebody from this neighborhood has a beef with someone from that neighborhood because when their high school played the other person’s high school, that guy’s girlfriend said something to your sister. And then they got into it, and you had a grudge against that guy for so long.

And now you find yourself in line with them at this liquor store. And you can imagine that that is a recipe for trouble in a country with 400 million guns and 330 million people. And you got a bunch of people in line who don’t just have grudges against one another, but they’re drunk on top of it.

And so when you look at the data, you can see between 10 and midnight at that spot where that that liquor store is located, there’s a certain level of predictably elevated risk of gun violence involvement. Why in the world are we not putting a cop car or a private security guard or a nonprofit violence interrupter or somebody there at that spot between 10 and midnight, night after night?

[00:16:52] Jeff Schechtman: Is there a self-perpetuating nature of this, then, in that in sectors where you have larger amounts of gun violence, even if it is driven by these impulses, that what you then have is fear in the community, less people going out and less eyes on the street.

[00:17:12] Jens Ludwig: Yes, absolutely. In fact, let me double down on that and make it… One way to frame what you’re saying is one of the underappreciated root causes of violence is violence. And let me double down on that and say I come to believe that gun violence may be the problem that sits upstream of every other problem facing cities.

My University of Chicago colleague Steve Levitt wrote a paper many years ago that showed that every murder that happens in a city reduces the city’s population by 70 people. That’s people moving out and fewer people moving in.

And if you look at the city now, there are lots of different reasons that drive city population change, not just gun violence, but gun violence is a very important part of it.

And so my hometown of Chicago has lost fully a million people since 1950. We were a city of 3.7 million people. Now we’re a city of closer to 2.7 seven million people. That leads to lots of abandoned houses and vacant lots all over the south and west sides. It depletes the city’s tax base for addressing any sort of social problem and on and on and on.

And so I totally agree with you. Any sort of focused effort to improve the gun violence situation can turn these vicious cycles into virtuous cycles. And I’m in New York City for the day. And I think this is a great example. If you think about what’s happened in New York City since the early 90s, when New York City got so much safer, it’s really has completely transformed the city, totally.

[00:18:50] Jeff Schechtman: Do we have to make the link, though, between gun violence and property crime? Because a lot of gun violence takes place in the committing of property crimes.

[00:19:02] Jens Ludwig: Yes, that turns out to be not what the data really suggest. Most gun violence is not committed as part of an economically motivated crime. Most gun violence in Chicago, for instance, 80% of shootings are arguments. They occur in public. Somebody gets into an argument, it gets escalated, and then it ends in tragedy because someone’s got a gun.

I think the types of policies that we need to address the property crime problem are different from the sort of policies that we need to address the violent crime problem. And I mentioned before: Property crime accounts for the large majority of all crimes in the United States. But when you look at what the public cares about, gun violence is the crime problem from the public’s perspective. It’s the thing that the public is most afraid of and most worried about. So that’s the problem that we really need to focus on fixing.

[00:20:00] Jeff Schechtman: And talk about the way the criminal justice system should look at this. Should it look at it any different, given this set of facts and this kind of information?

[00:20:11] Jens Ludwig: Yes, this gets to the point of things that we could. So one sort of thing that we could do is try and increase the chance that there’s some eyes in the street who could deescalate these 10-minute windows when they happen.

I think your question gets to a second type of thing that we can do to address gun violence that is surprisingly helpful, which is change what people bring with them into these 10-minute windows. And so when you look at the data from the city of Chicago, 90% of homicide offenders and 80% of homicide victims have prior arrest records.

What that means is the criminal justice system had a chance to do something hopefully helpful — something developmentally productive with that person because they were in the criminal justice system’s custody. And we collectively, as a society, blew it.

We missed the chance to do something with them that could have been helpful. And  what does that look like? To give you a little bit of intuition about this, we worked with the juvenile detention center in Chicago many years ago that was taken over by a federal judge.

A new administrator comes in. He’s trying to think about ways to make it better. He doesn’t have much money to do anything. He notices that the kids are going to the Chicago public school there in the morning. In the afternoon, they sit around in the common room watching TV for hour upon hour while the detention guard stands against the wall watching the kids watching TV. And so the administrator says, “Surely there’s something that we can do that’s better for kids than just having them watch TV.” So what did he do? He had them…

When you talk to poker players — I think this is a useful analogy. When you talk to poker players, they talk about when they’re playing poker, they’re trying to be very strategic and rational and whatever. But then, sometimes emotion takes over their fast-thinking selves. They start to behave emotionally. And by the end of the night, they’ve lost a lot of money.

And so, through trial and error, poker players will tell you that an important way they get better at poker is they learn to avoid going on what poker players call, “on tilt.” It’s named after a pinball machine. When you smack it or you lift it up, it gives you an “on tilt” error message. Poker players learn to avoid going on tilt themselves. And the fact that poker players learn how to do this through trial and error tells you that it is something that people can learn.

Problem is if you’re a 16-year-old kid growing up on the south or west sides of Chicago, trial and error is a very dangerous way to learn how to navigate the difficult situations that kids are facing. And so within the juvenile detention center, we work with them to implement a behavioral economics program that basically gave kids practice through simulated trial and error to recognize what sort of triggers made them go on tilt, how to recognize that, and how to get themselves off it. And when you look at the data, those sorts of programs can generate remarkably large changes in crime, given the cost. So 20% reductions in recidivism for kids, basically for free, because you already had the guards, you had the building, you have the kids. Give me five things that reduce crime by 20% that are free. And I think we’re really onto something.

[00:23:36] Jeff Schechtman: One of the other problems seems to be, and this is particularly true of young people, and it runs counter to the things you’re talking about, is that we live in a society that is constantly speeded up. That whether it’s social media, whether it’s video games or just the general tenor of society is to move faster, which makes it harder to expand those 10-minute segments.

[00:24:01] Jens Ludwig: Yes, absolutely. I teach at the University of Chicago. I have a lot of conversations with professor friends, not just the University of Chicago, but other universities around the country. And the topic of conversation is how it’s just so hard to get the current generation of students to sit down and focus and do something like read a book cover to cover. I do think that that is unhelpful, probably, in lots of different ways.

And we don’t have the data to draw these causal links right now. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that ability to be focused and stay mindful, or whatever you would want to call it, winds up being at a population level a long term contributor to the violence problem. Some future researcher will have to test that hypothesis. But I find it very plausible as a hypothesis myself.

[00:24:59] Jeff Schechtman: How difficult have you found it to try — and this brings us back in some ways to where we began this conversation — to convince people that this is a realistic approach to dealing with gun violence, given how hardened positions are on either side of the aisle.

[00:25:17] Jens Ludwig: Yes I think that there are maybe two different things that have been hard to convince people of. One is what the right solution is. And I think even more profound has been the difficulty of convincing people that the problem is not hopeless.

And so I think two of the data points that wind up being enormously powerful for making both of those cases is to note that in 1991, the murder rate in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City was almost identical at about 30 murders per 100,000 city residents. To calibrate that, let me just point out that the murder rate in London is usually something like one or two per 100,000 to give you a sense for how off the charts this problem is in the United States compared to any other rich country in the world.

And in the 30 years following that… So that was 1991, the peak of the crack cocaine epidemic in the United States. The murder rate dropped by nearly 80% in Los Angeles and nearly 90% in New York City. And lpeople’s morality did not magically change in L.A. and New York; the criminal justice system did not become dramatic. The jail population in New York declined over this time period. And those cities didn’t end these really big root causes there of poverty and segregation and social isolation and everything else that people have been understandably and appropriately trying to solve in cities for decade after decade.

And yet we see these huge changes in gun violence. Now, those cities did a bunch of things that were not helpful, and some of those things were actually harmful. But a bunch of the things that they did wound up being very helpful. And I think the words “behavioral economics” are in no city planning policy planning document. But I think a lot of the things that they did are very consistent with the behavioral economics perspective on what to do.

And so I like to point to those two cities to say, look, everything else that we’ve been trying hasn’t worked. Here are two positive outliers in the American public safety landscape. Don’t we have something to learn from them? And maybe even more important, every city out there around the country who feels like this problem is hopeless should look at L.A. and New York.

And even if you don’t like the policies that L.A. and New York adopted, you should look at them and realize the problem can be solved in a way that you might not have thought is possible. So don’t give up hope. I think this book hopefully gives you a blueprint for thinking about policies that could be tailored to your local city context that really could make a huge difference.

[00:28:13] Jeff Schechtman: Within this broader context, when you look at other nations — when you look at Europe, when you look at Japan, you mentioned London before — when you look at these other places, why is it that the problem is not the same as it is here?

[00:28:29] Jens Ludwig: I think a big part of the issue is gun availability. I think that the 400 million guns that we have in a country of 330… People in London get in arguments the same way that people in Chicago and New York and San Francisco and whatever else do. The difference is that the 400 million guns we have in the United States greatly increase the chances that an argument leads to a death. Now, the challenge is that those 400 million guns aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. And we’re all looking at the same newspaper headlines about the prospects of gun control changes in Washington, D.C., and they look slim.

And so the good news out of the book is that in some sense, gun violence equals guns plus violence. That is, it’s not just about gun availability. It’s also about the willingness of people to use those widely available guns to hurt one another. And I think a lot of people get depressed about the state of gun control in the United States. I think the book has a fundamentally optimistic message that says even if gun control is stuck, there’s a second path to making real progress on this problem, which is reducing the willingness of people to use guns to maim and kill one of them.

[00:29:43] Jeff Schechtman: Jens Ludwig, this book is Unforgiving Places, the Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. Jens, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:29:54] Jens Ludwig: Thanks so much for having me on, Jeff. I really appreciate it.

[00:29:56] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.