A Different Way of Preventing Violent Crime
Even if we can’t do all that much about guns, we can make real progress on gun violence by reducing interpersonal violence. In fact, a growing body of data and evidence shows that preventing shootings in the first place is not only possible, but enormously cost-effective compared to the traditional policies of U.S. partisan politics.
This, in fact, is the central problem: going back at least to the 1930s the Left and Right have bitterly disagreed about how to reduce violent behavior. The Right tends to think of violence as being caused by intrinsically bad people who are unafraid of the criminal justice system. The only response, under this perspective, is to try to disincentivize gun violence with the threat of ever-more-severe criminal justice punishments.
The Left tends to think of violence as due to bad socio-economic conditions, which leads desperate people to resort to crime and violence in order to feed their families. The only response in this view is to disincentivize violence by improving the alternatives to crime and ending poverty.
But the root of gun violence is not what we think it is. Both the Left and Right, despite their heated disagreements, share an implicit assumption about gun violence: That before anyone pulls a trigger, they carefully weigh the pros and cons beforehand. That gun violence is a deliberate, rational act.
That’s not what most shootings in America are. Most shootings are not premeditated. Most shootings, instead, start with words—arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone has a gun.
Whatever people are doing in the middle of a heated argument, it’s most definitely not a careful, deliberate weighing of pros and cons. In those moments, most people are instead acting emotionally, almost automatically—not even really thinking about what we’re doing, in the usual sense of “thinking.”
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There are social programs that help people better understand their own minds and how to prevent their emotions from taking over. My research center has partnered with a remarkable set of non-profits in Chicago including Youth Guidance, Brightpoint, and Youth Advocate Programs to study programs that help young people recognize when they’re about to engage in something like catastrophizing (or something else) that makes the risk of violence more likely, and how to avoid that. These sorts of programs, and even lower-cost versions that detention-center staff can deliver, have been shown to reduce crime and violence by 20 to 50%.
Jens Ludwig
May 15, 2025
This sounds plausible. But the study was published in 2016. If it was that successful and that inexpensive, why was it not adopted statewide or even nationwide by now?
