REVIEW: ‘Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence’ by Jens Ludwig
Jens Ludwig is an economist who’s seen some things. A longtime gun-violence researcher who directs the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, he’s accompanied cops to murder scenes and on high-speed chases.
America’s efforts to control gun violence, he argues in Unforgiving Places, are coming up short. Liberals’ focus on “root causes” and conservatives’ support for incarceration both seek to shape the deeper incentives surrounding violence—and to incapacitate violent people, in prison’s case. These approaches have their uses, but they fail to capitalize on an important detail about how violence tends to happen.
Violence isn’t usually cold, calculated, and rational; it generally doesn’t come from economic motives, logical cost-benefit analysis, or a stable, pathological drive to inflict pain on the innocent. Instead, it most often happens in 10-minute windows of heated arguments and decisions made under stress. Ludwig repeatedly invokes the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s concepts of “System 1” and “System 2” thinking—the former being automatic and instinctual, the latter more careful, slow, and effortful.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Washington Free Beacon
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Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
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