Paul Rand: Every year the country’s gun violence epidemic creeps back into the national conversation. But after decades of debates and new policy ideas, the tires just keep spinning in place.

Tape: Now to an important look at rising gun violence across the country.

Tape: Take a look at the clock. By the time this hour is over, according to CDC data, at least five Americans will have died from guns.

Tape: It is a question we ask on this program every time we report on the latest outbreak of gun violence. When are we going to do something to solve for this uniquely American problem?

Jens Ludwig: We’ve made remarkably little progress on the gun violence problem in America.

Paul Rand: That’s Jens Ludwig, a professor at the University of Chicago and director of the University’s Crime Lab.

Jens Ludwig: The murder rate today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1900 in the United States, so something’s not working.

Paul Rand: And yet both sides of the political aisle have pushed their own ideas about how to solve it.

Jens Ludwig: People on the right tend to think of gun violence as being due to characterologically bad people who aren’t afraid of whatever the criminal justice system is going to do to them. That leads you to think the only way that you can solve the gun violence problem is to basically disincentivize it by threatening people with ever stiffer prison sentences.

Paul Rand: We have built one of the harshest criminal justice systems in the world, but the murder rate hasn’t changed.

Jens Ludwig: People on the left historically have tended to think of gun violence as being due to economic desperation. These are people who are desperate to feed their families. And so that leads you to think that the gun violence problem, the only way to solve it is to disincentivize it by making the alternatives to crime better. More jobs, programs, more anti-poverty.

Paul Rand: Those alternatives do work in many ways and can greatly improve the quality of people’s lives, but the data show that they don’t actually make a direct impact on curbing gun violence.

Jens Ludwig: You know what those two conventional wisdoms both share is the belief, the implicit belief usually, that gun violence is basically premeditated and deliberate, and it turns out that’s not what gun violence in America is. So we’ve just been misdiagnosing the problem. We’ve been like trying to cure cancer with heart disease drugs. No wonder we haven’t made more progress, and I think we just need a very, very different diagnosis of the problem to be able to solve it.

Paul Rand: And Ludwig believes he’s found the diagnosis. It’s the focus of his new book, Unforgiving Places, the Unexpected Origins of Gun Violence.

Jens Ludwig: Gun Violence is partly a function of guns and gun availability, but also a function of violence, the willingness of people to use guns to harm other people. So it’s gun violence equals guns plus violence. And that actually leads to an optimistic observation, which is if you can’t do anything about the gun side of the equation, you can do something about the violent behavior side of the equation.

Paul Rand: That’s where Ludwig’s research is unique. He has found remarkable results in examining gun violence using the techniques of behavioral science.

Jens Ludwig: The first step in really understanding what the problem is that we’re trying to solve is to understand what gun violence is, and it is not premeditated, deliberate. It’s not motivated by economic considerations like robberies and gang wars over drug selling turf. Most shootings are crimes of passion, not profit. Recognizing that rage is one of the most powerful of all human passions.

Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains where we explore the groundbreaking research and discoveries that are transforming our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs. On today’s episode, how we can address the gun violence epidemic using science.

Big Brains is supported by UChicago’s Online Master of Liberal Arts Program, which empowers working professionals to think deeply, communicate clearly, and act purposely to advance their careers, choose from optional concentrations in ethics and leadership, literary studies and tech and society. More at mla.uchicago.edu.

Well, you bring the story to life about why we’ve stalled with a story at the start of the book where you talked about two Chicago neighborhoods, Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore. Pull that apart a little bit for us if you would.

Jens Ludwig: So I’m sitting in my University of Chicago office right now here in Hyde Park. I’ve got a southbound window, so I look out, and if I could look over Woodlawn, I’d be looking at South Shore. And if I pivot in the other direction, there’s Greater Grand Crossing. So they sit literally right across the street from each other, Dorchester Avenue at 71st Street. And the economic conditions are almost exactly the same in the two neighborhoods. The demographics of the neighborhoods are almost exactly the same, and both neighborhoods are served by exactly the same criminal justice system.

Paul Rand: But these two neighborhoods couldn’t be more different when it comes to one thing.

Jens Ludwig: On a per capita basis, shootings are fully twice as common in Greater Grand Crossing.

Paul Rand: So if one neighborhood has a much higher rate of gun violence than the other, but is pretty much similar in every other way, why would it have more violence?

Jens Ludwig: Everybody’s intuition that social conditions must matter a lot would predict that the rates of shootings would be exactly the same. Literally right across Dorchester Avenue shootings are twice as common. That got me to think, no wonder we have not made more progress solving the gun violence problem in a world in which we literally can’t explain why shootings are so much more common on one side of the street than the other.

Paul Rand: The difference in these two neighborhoods got Ludwig thinking that there must be more to the story. So he pulled out a tool that his colleagues at the Crime Lab use frequently, behavioral economics.

Jens Ludwig: Part of human behavior that we can actually model and understand and anticipate and work with in designing policies and markets and whatever is the part that’s rational. And I think the key breakthrough with behavioral economics was the realization that the mistakes that people make have some predictable structure. And once the mistakes have some predictable structure, then you can anticipate what people are going to do. And that anticipation then lets you design interventions to address it. Right? And one of the key insights of behavioral economics is that our minds engage in two types of thinking of which we’re only aware of one. And so the deliberate weighing of pros and cons, psychologists and behavioral economists call that slow thinking. So Danny Kahneman in his wonderful book Thinking Fast and Slow calls that System Two.

The problem with that is that that’s very mentally effortful. When our mental bandwidth is depleted when we’re under stress, our minds are designed to have another type of thinking that is so low effort, it happens below the level of consciousness, it’s almost automatic or involuntary. It’s fast thinking or Danny Kahneman calls it System One thinking.

Paul Rand: And you can imagine how certain situations, for example, a heated altercation can turn out very differently depending on which system is taking the wheel.

Jens Ludwig: Anybody who has ever been in a really heated altercation knows that they are just not thinking about anything the way you would normally think about it. We all go on tilt in difficult situations, and we act emotionally. And System One is doing things that we don’t necessarily realize. And I tell the story in the book about living in Hyde Park every Wednesday morning, I take my very sweet hound dog shepherd mix Icco out for a walk. And one Wednesday morning I’m walking Icco around Hyde Park, and we pass by a house where an unleashed dog, a very big unleashed dog, comes tearing down the driveway.

Turns out the person who lives there is also a University of Chicago faculty member, and their dog is barking furiously, teeth bared, about to attack my dog. And if I were thinking about the incentives, I would think the last thing that I want to do is start any trouble with this guy. They work at the same place that I do. They send their kids to the same schools that I do. Worst case scenario, I could always pick my dog up to protect her. Worst case scenario is just an extra vet trip if she winds up getting bit. This was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Paul Rand: So in other words, you went off on them?

Jens Ludwig: My System One just completely took over in that situation and did something that all of our System Ones do all the time. Our System One view the world as a one person play where we’re the star of the play. So everything’s about me. And I thought, "Why did this guy intentionally leave his dog off leash so they could attack?" But clearly rationally you would say, this was a mistake.

Paul Rand: Absolutely.

Jens Ludwig: Poker players talk about when you’re playing poker and you get frustrated, they start to play emotionally. They call it going on tilt. And it’s named after a pinball machine where if you smack it or you lift it up, it gives you a tilt message. I totally went on tilt. I lost my mind. I used every four letter, seven letter and 12 letter word I knew and maybe invented a few on top of those. Afterwards, I was deeply shaken. I was like, "Oh, my God." It’s not unique to me, it’s not unique to anyone. It’s human nature.

Paul Rand: And this experience got Ludwig thinking, what if the missing piece was actually how much control the gun holder had over their System One?

Jens Ludwig: I think at a high level what the argument of the book is is that gun violence is much more of a System One problem, a System One fast thinking problem than a System Two incentive problem. And all of our policies have been focused on addressing System Two and changing incentives, and I think that’s why we haven’t made more progress.

Paul Rand: We’ve long assumed that gun violence is premeditated, that it’s thoroughly planned out like a robbery. But as Ludwig points out, our assumptions have just been wrong.

Jens Ludwig: We’ve known that most shootings in America stem from arguments going back at least to the 1960s.

Paul Rand: About 80%, is that the right number?

Jens Ludwig: Yeah. Franklin Zimmering was a law professor at the University of Chicago in 1968. He got all the homicide data from the Chicago Police Department for 1967. He went through every case file and realized that 80% of all shootings in Chicago at that time stemmed from arguments. Somebody’s pissed off at somebody else, someone’s got a gun, somebody winds up dead.

Paul Rand: So back to this line of thinking, it’s System One, and people are not thinking about the consequences of what happens if they use the gun?

Jens Ludwig: Yeah, exactly. As if people are being very rational about this. And it turns out that’s not what gun violence in America is. When you look closely at the data as I have, you can see most shootings in America are not premeditated. They’re not motivated by economic considerations. They’re garden variety arguments that go sideways, and they end in tragedy because someone’s got a gun.

Paul Rand: And it could be arguments or it could be other things that go into pride, right? Or fear

Jens Ludwig: Or revenge and retaliation from some previous argument that went bad or something like that. And I think that there are people who are shot during robberies for sure, but that’s just a small share of all shootings in America. There are gang wars over drug-selling turf for sure, but those are just a small share of all murders and shootings that happen in America. The overwhelming majority of shootings are arguments that ended in tragedy because someone’s got a gun. And I think, again, we’ve known this for a long time, I spent a bunch of time looking at the data to see if what Franklin Zimmering found in 1968 is still true in 2025. And the answer is, it is.

And I think the reason that we keep forgetting that is think about how most of us come to understand the gun violence problem in America. It’s from the media, it’s from news and entertainment. And it turns out that the news and entertainment give us a very unrepresentative picture of what gun violence is because they are in the business of keeping people interested, right? Two guys get in an argument over a stolen car, somebody winds up dead is not an interesting five-season series on HBO. We are getting a very unrepresentative picture of what the gun violence problem is from the sources of information that we have. And so we keep forgetting this really, really, really important basic fact that I hope the book helps put more of a spotlight on.

Paul Rand: If we could actually address the root causes of gun violence, then could we implement better solutions? Well, that’s what Ludwig and his colleagues have tried to achieve with the Crime Lab, and the data shows that their policy ideas and programs are working. That’s after the break.

If you’re getting a lot out of the important research shared on Big Brains, there’s another University of Chicago podcast network show you should check out. It’s called Entitled, and it’s about human rights. Co-hosted by lawyers and new Chicago law school professors, Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg, Entitled explores the stories around why rights matter and what’s the matter with rights.

If System One behavior is driving the majority of gun violence, then maybe we could do something about addressing people’s behaviors before they get into a potentially violent situation.

Jens Ludwig: We came up with this hypothesis that a lot of this gun violence might really be System One, not System Two driven, but then it was really important for us to test it. So the very first project that the Crime Lab did is we partnered with this amazing nonprofit in Chicago called Youth Guidance. They’d come up with this amazing social program called Becoming a Man that basically helps people not go on tilt.

Paul Rand: Explain how this works, Jens. What goes into the training in becoming a man?

Jens Ludwig: The way that human learning happens often is through trial and error. And the way poker players learn this is you’re sitting at a table and you get super pissed, and all of a sudden you’ve lost five hands in a row. And it’s like, "Oh, I just learned a very expensive lesson." But if you’re talking about poker, there’s only so costly the lesson can be. If you’re a 16-year-old kid living in Englewood and you get this wrong, the costs can be really, really severe, like life altering severe, right?

And so one way to think about at a high level what these programs are doing is they’re trying to give kids lower stakes opportunities to learn to go off tilt through practice and trial and error. And so as a way to see that, let me explain the very first exercise that the kids do in becoming a man.

Paul Rand: Please.

Jens Ludwig: So this is middle school and high school age boys in some of the most economically disadvantaged high violence neighborhoods on the south and west sides of Chicago. And they get out of an academic class once a week to participate. There’s 12 kids in the group. There’s a program counselor. And so then they pair us up. So, Paul, you and I would be a pair. The first exercise is called The Fist. They would give me a rubber ball and say, "Paul, you have 30 seconds to get the ball out of Jens’ hand. The only rule is there are no rules. Go." And so what most of the kids do is they basically just beat the crap out of each other for 30 seconds. You will try and pry my hand open. You’ll break my pinky. That won’t work. You’ll put me in a headlock. That won’t work. You’ll start punching me in the stomach. Then the program counselor will call time, and then we’ll switch. You’ve got the ball, I do the same thing to you. And then they’ll reconvene us and we’ll do a debrief, and they’ll say, "Okay, Paul, what strategies did you employ?"

What you’ll say is something like, "I tried to pry open his hand. I broke his pinky." The program counselor will say, "Why didn’t you ask for the ball?" It’s very striking, and I think Youth Guidance has now done them with thousands, maybe 10,000 kids now or something over the last decade. And what the youth guidance folks say is literally not more than a handful or two of kids ever think to ask. So that’s like trial, error and reflection is the key to learning. And there you can see, it’s like trial, error and feedback about how your System One made an assumption about the situation, about the potential solutions that you might consider.

Paul Rand: The program raised about a million dollars to serve as many kids in Chicago as possible.

Jens Ludwig: Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to serve every kid who would benefit in Chicago. And so we basically held a random lottery to decide which eligible kids would get the program. And so then you can see if you’re flipping a coin to decide which eligible kids get it, then you’ve got two groups of kids who are similar on average because you’ve allocated the program with a coin flip. You’re in a world that’s very similar to a randomized control trial. You can compare the subsequent outcomes of the two groups. They’re the same on average because they’re randomly assigned to one or the other.

Paul Rand: And the outcomes were pretty remarkable. The Chicago kids who enrolled in the Becoming a Man program, were far less likely to get involved with gun violence down the road.

Jens Ludwig: When we use police department data to look at rates of violence involvement down the road, we can see that the kids who get the program are 50% less likely to get arrested for violent crime.

Paul Rand: And this is a huge effect, basically akin to the 1990s nationwide drop in violence that was called the great crime decline.

Jens Ludwig: They’re also much less likely to get arrested for gun carrying. And so you can see all of that is pointing in the direction of big reductions in gun violence.

Paul Rand: The main behavioral tool used by programs like Becoming a Man is a framework called Sodas.

Jens Ludwig: The SODAS framework, it stands for situation. Whenever we confront any sort of social interaction, we are going through a set of very quick System One thoughts that again happen below the level of consciousness that we’re not even thinking about, each of which creates an opportunity for System One to make a mistake. And these are very difficult cognitive tasks, so no wonder that System One gets these wrong. So the first thing that we’ve got to do is just figure out what’s going on here. What is the situation in front of me? That’s the S in SODAS. The other thing that we’ve got to figure out is, what do I want out of this situation? That’s my objective. That’s the O in SODAS.

And then we’ve got to think about what to do. What are we going to do? What are the disadvantages and advantages of different solution strategies that we might solve? That’s the D, A and S in SODAS. The first point in introducing that structure is to note each one of those is a very, very difficult cognitive task. You are sitting here right now with a very impressive poker face as you’re interviewing me, and I am trying to figure out does Paul think this interview is going well? Does he think it’s going badly? Is he bored? Is he fascinated?

The plain English version of this is we take everything personally. We think that everything is about us. System One is helping me by assuming that’s about me. But you can then see if I’m walking down the sidewalk on the south side of Chicago and someone is walking in the other direction, and they’ve got just the most horrible look on their face, glance at me, and then they take a couple more steps and spit on the sidewalk or whatever, I’ve got to decide, is any of that about me or is it not about me?

Paul Rand: One of the other explanations that you give for gun violence is you talk about low social control. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what that is and how it relates.

Jens Ludwig: Gun violence is mistakes that people make in very difficult situations or mistakes that people make in unforgiving places would be another way to say it. And we can also try and make unforgiving places more forgiving. In her wonderful book from 1960 whatever, the urban planner, Jane Jacobs, she was living in New York City at the time, and she said, "How can it be that similarly poor neighborhoods vary so much in their level of violence?" her equivalent of South Shore versus Greater Grand Crossing. And she was like, "What in the world is going on?" So Jane Jacobs walked the streets of New York and looked at what’s going on, and she came back and concluded as she writes in her book, "Oh, I think I can see what’s going on here that there are big differences in the degree to which people are out and about and willing to step in and intervene and deescalate conflict, and I think that gives us a way to understand the mystery of South Shore versus Greater Grand Crossing."

Paul Rand: Picture for a moment the two neighborhoods of South Shore and Greater Grand Crossing.

Jens Ludwig: South Shore is a neighborhood that’s located right along Lake Michigan, one of the most beautiful, amazing jewels of Chicago. The lake is just so gorgeous. Understandably, everybody wants to be near the lake. That advantage of location led to a ton of commercial development in South Shore that you don’t have nearly as much of in Greater Grand Crossing. So there are stores and restaurants and everything else all over the place in South Shore. What in the world would that have to do with gun violence?

Well, what that has to do with gun violence is stuff that you want to walk to draws people out of their house, so you have people on the street walking around able to serve as eyes on the street. And so this is to say one of the ways that you can get eyes on the street is stuff that we would normally think of as being relevant to gun violence. That’s like what are we doing with our police department? Do we have nonprofits around that can put community violence interrupters into those spaces like credible messengers to try and deconflict this? But other parts of the solution here you wouldn’t think of as being relevant to gun violence at all.

Urban planning and making sure that we’ve got stores and restaurants and commercial activity interspersed with residential, turns out to be hugely important for gun violence. You can see in randomized experiments of situations that change different things that lead to more and less foot traffic, you can see changes in shooting rates on the order of 10, 20, 30%. Those are huge changes from this thing that you would have imagined is totally irrelevant for this huge social problem.

Paul Rand: All right, you mentioned a second ago police, and it’s impossible to have this conversation without the answer is just we need more police. Where do police fit into this equation, police violence fits into this equation? How should we think about that?

Jens Ludwig: To the extent to which police reduce violence by acting as eyes on the street, that’s telling you that police can be preventive. They’re not just controlling crime by making arrests either incapacitating criminals or deterring crime through arrest. One of the things that people say all the time is, "Oh, you just can’t arrest your way out of the problem." That’s right. But that’s not only what police do. In the data, you can see when you put more police out on the street, crime goes down and arrests for serious crime goes down as well. They’re doing something preventive, not just making arrests.

And I think an important part of that is to serve as this sort of eyes on the street thing. And the reason that that’s so important, because as you know Paul, one of the other big concerns that we have in the United States is this growing recognition for the harms of having a criminal justice system as we have.

Paul Rand: Yes.

Jens Ludwig: And I think one of the reasons that people are so nervous about the policing enterprise in America is, is the cure worse than the disease? Are we just going to exacerbate the challenge of having so many people behind bars? The good news out of this is the data seems to suggest that police are preventive, and so it’s getting us the best of all worlds, right? It’s fewer crimes, and because the crimes aren’t happening, you don’t need to put somebody behind bars. So I think the other reason that people are concerned about the policing enterprise in the United States is the rate of police misconduct that we have here, which is just the rate at which police, for instance, shoot civilians, is just off the charts compared to the UK as well.

I think there are lots and lots of analogies between crime and police misconduct. If you think about crime by civilians, there are bad apples in the civilian world. In the same way in policing, there are clearly some people who should not be cops. And I think I know a bunch of people in the Chicago Police Department, they would be the first to tell you that guy should not be a cop. Right? With that said, it is also the case that a bunch of the misconduct that happens in the same way that a bunch of crime that happens is normal people making a mistake in a difficult situation. The data seems to suggest that a fair amount of misconduct has the same sort of flavor. It’s not someone who’s a bad apple cop, they’re just making a mistake in a very difficult situation.

Paul Rand: Going back to our System One mindset, it’s human nature, right? So using this line of thinking, researchers wanted to see if they could teach police officers in training how to tap into their System Two versus System One in various difficult situations.

Jens Ludwig: My colleagues, Oeindrila Dube, who’s here at the University of Chicago; Sandy Jo MacArthur, who used to be at LAPD; and Anuj Shah, who is now at Princeton, they did this amazing project where they basically did a version of BAM for Chicago cops. They developed this AI driven virtual simulator thing, simulation exercises that help cops see very quickly my System One too quickly jumped to a conclusion about what the situation was that was wrong, and I’m learning to be a little bit more skeptical of my initial System One assessment of what’s going on, that is I’m learning to be a little bit more System Two in those situations.

And you can see in the data, these were real Chicago cops going through training in the academy and then going out all over Chicago patrolling. And then we’re looking at the data to see what happens. And what you can see is that there are reductions in police use of force, and there are narrowing of disparities in arrests between white and black citizens, and there’s a reduction in what we believe to be low level, low public safety value arrests.

Paul Rand: Well, it works. You’ve made in this discussion in the book, it works, this should be an easy solve. We know what the answer is. Why are we having this conversation?

Jens Ludwig: I think the reason that we’re having this conversation is because I think it flows a little bit from where we started. We keep forgetting the lesson of what gun violence is because we’re getting very non-representative pictures of gun violence from the media. In the most recent mayoral election here in Chicago, the political survey people said crime and gun violence was the number one concern of voters in Chicago. That’s not a surprise, but the surprise is they say the gap between number one and the number two concern was as large as they’ve ever seen it.

So this is to say gun violence is not just a concern, it is the overwhelming concern. The overwhelming concern of people who live in Chicago and not just Chicago. Go to Philadelphia, go to Baltimore, go to Detroit, go to Oakland, go to St. Louis. On and on and on, so many of our American cities, this is the thing that people are worried about. In my talking to people around Chicago, there’s almost unlimited motivation to solve the problem. People have just been puzzled and frustrated that we just don’t know what to do. And so I hope that this book also provides a little bit of a blueprint for people to see which directions might be most helpful. Because I know that every city that is struggling with this problem in America, which is to say almost every city is desperate for a way out of this. I think everybody who lives there is super motivated for their city to figure it out.

Matt Hodapp: Big Brains is a production of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. We’re sponsored by the Graham School. Are you a lifelong learner with an insatiable curiosity? Access more than 50 open enrollment courses every quarter. Learn more at graham.uchicago.edu/big brains. If you like what you heard on our podcast, please leave us a rating and review. The show is hosted by Paul M. Rand and produced by Lea Ceasrine and me, Matt Hodapp. Thanks for listening.