Transcript of Malcolm Gladwell on America’s Gun Crisis New

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Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric and this is Next Question. The debate over guns in America has long been dominated by narratives on both sides, narratives that Malcolm Gladwell believes are misconstrued, even dishonest. His new book, The American Way of Killing, takes many of these arguments and reexamines them through the lens of history and present-day characters who have been touched by gun violence. A central theme of this book is that America needs more, not fewer, police officers. And you'll hear some pretty stunning revelations he discovered that bolster his argument. As usual, Gladwell takes our previously conceived notions, challenges them, and makes us think. Malcolm Gladwell. Hi, Malcolm. I'm so happy to see you to talk about this new book, The American Way of Killing. I have been a longtime gun safety advocate and have worked on this issue in various capacities. I actually executive produced a documentary called Under the Gun.

Oh, wow.

That talked about the proliferation of guns in America and why, even after Sandy Hook, we couldn't come up with better regulations. So I'm super interested in this topic. And I love the way that you have kind of challenged some of my long-held beliefs and made me think about things differently. But I'm still going to challenge some of your challenges. All right.

Go right ahead.

That's the point of the book.

I know you've been writing about crime for a long time, but this is your first book about guns. Gun violence specifically. So tell me all these years later, Malcolm, why you decided now would be the right time to explore the issue.

Well, a couple reasons. I mean, as you point out, I have been— in almost every book I've written, I've had a chapter about some aspect of crime or violence. So it's a kind of ongoing fascination of mine, but I've never kind of put all of those thoughts together in one place. That was one thing. The other thing is that the field of criminology has evolved really, really fast. We know way, way, way more about crime and violence now than we did, say, 25 years ago, which is unusual because a lot of these kind of— we think of these fields of study as being pretty stable.

Why was there a resurgence or a sudden interest in criminology in recent decades? Because there was so much crying?

I don't know. I feel like in some part it's people rediscovering things that had been kind of quietly known for a long time. There was a whole group of young, very, very thoughtful and intelligent people who went into the field and kind of revolutionized it. I don't have a good answer to that. The fields of specialty like that evolve in very kind of random ways. There's moments where everyone kind of wakes up. And so I remember writing about— I don't write about it in this book, but in my last book, I wrote about the work of a guy named David Weisburd, who was part of this field that just started to look at maps of crime. And he and a couple of others were the ones who pointed out that if you take a city, you break it down block by block, crime happens, is concentrated in just a handful of blocks. And those same blocks are where crime happens year after year after year after year. So when you think about policing a city, you don't have to police the whole city. You got to figure out where those crucial blocks are. That was something police officers walking the beat would've known that in a kind of intuitive way that, why am I always over the course of my 20-year career returning to the same block?

But it took Weisburd and a bunch of others to look at, to take years and years of crime data and overlay them on top of the maps of cities that are And see this kind of pattern. So that's sort of what's been going on in a wide variety of areas of crime, and it's revolutionized our understanding.

I think it's so interesting because one of the things you do is you take issue and really untangle these narratives that have taken hold on both sides of the debate. And before we talk about that, I wanted to ask you about your podcast, Revisionist History, because This really was born from this podcast, right?

Yeah.

And how did you decide what to write about? How do you approach these topics? Because I would love to just spend a little time in that big brain of yours, Malcolm, and figure out sort of like you say, okay, I want to do this. How do I go about it? Because it's not boring. It's really a fascinating read. And a lot of people would think a book about gun violence in America would be quite granular and detailed and hundreds of pages long. So when you set out to really look at this topic, how did you decide how you were going to do it?

As so often these ideas do, it started quite randomly. I was I got interested in a very specific idea, which I end up writing a chapter on in the book, or 2 chapters on, which is that the homicide rate is a function of 2 things: the level of violence and your access to medical care. So if I— I think about this because I live upstate. If— and when I'm in the city, suppose I'm on the Upper East Side and somebody shoots me, I'm going to get to a Level 1 trauma center in 3 minutes. Unless they shoot me in the head or the heart, I'm gonna survive. That's how good medical care is. If the exa— if I suffer the exact same injury where I live in upstate New York, I'm gonna die. I'm, I'm an hour from a, from a hospital where I live, from a, from a trauma center. And that's, you know, that's if the ambulance arrives right away. I mean, the ambulance is gonna take half an hour to get to my house. There's a gate. They don't have the gate code. I mean, like, I could go on.

Yeah.

So your access to— so in one case, in the city, I'm not a homicide, I'm just an injury, and the person gets charged with aggravated assault. The same person shooting me upstate, that's a homicide, and it counts in the homicide statistics as a murder, and that person goes to jail for life. So we don't think about that second piece of the puzzle, which is healthcare. So I got interested in this case, in this idea, and I was reading through the literature and I came across a study. in an obscure journal from like 30 years ago about these 2 people. And there was a footnote in the study. Study was like 6 pages long. It was all about prisoners in Alabama, Black and white and blah blah. At the end is this footnote which was so unbelievable and which, and which threw the whole study into kind of such sharp relief. And it was from, like I said, 30 years ago. I didn't know if the people were still alive. So I call up the guy who wrote the study, who was a guy in his 80s, a former professor at Auburn. And I went to see him.

All because of a footnote?

Yeah. And he lives in this plantation house in the middle of the woods of Alabama. He's like, like I say, he's in his 80s, got a giant dog, house is falling down. This kind of fascinating guy. And I proceeded to have the most extraordinary conversation, which I write about in the book, with this man. And that just got me. It began with this kind of journey. I was— I remember trying to get in touch with him. He wasn't really online much. I had to track down his telephone number. He's suffered from an illness, so he's sort of hard to communicate with. I've I finally kind of got him to agree that I could come to Alabama, and I didn't know what I was going to get. And, you know, it's this weird thing, and I didn't know my GPS was going to work. I mean, the whole thing was just kind of so strange. But in meeting with this man, as he told me, he told me this story about a, a boy who he had taken in, a kid from the streets who he'd taken into his house 30 years ago, and who had ended up becoming a friend and becoming the boyfriend of his daughter, and what happened to this boy and how this story broke his heart.

And I just remember sitting in this guy, he's telling the story of something that happened 30 years ago, and it just— and there's a punchline to the story which I'm not going to ruin. And I was just floored. I mean, I just was, Katie. It was like I was in tears. I was And he's speaking in this kind of halting— in the audiobook version of the book, you hear him speak, and he has a kind of mild speech impediment, but it's incredibly— so you're hanging on every word. And I just thought, wow, we talk about this topic of crime from 20,000 feet.

With lots of stats and—

Stats. And I was like, no, I want to tell a different Tell the story in a different way. I want to, I want to tell a series of stories about people and situations and predicaments and heartbreaking stories and weird, bizarre kind of digressions. That's how I want to do it. I want to do it in an idiosyncratic way. And that's what led to the book.

Can you reveal what was in that footnote, or do you have to read the book?

I will just tell you that So this man who was this professor, he and his wife began to take in strays because he had been raised— he was raised in abject poverty in a little town in the middle of nowhere. And as a result, he always had a kind of soft spot in his heart for kind of wayward kids. And he took in a street kid in Montgomery, Alabama in the 1990s. And the kid comes into his home, but he's part of a gang. And so in coming into his home, this man was inviting basically gangs into his life. And so it's a story of what happened as that kid tries to disentangle himself from the gang and what happens as the professor kind of falls in love with the kid. And I mean, he comes to think of the kid as his own son, and then the tragedy that I'm afraid to read what happens to the young man because if you were in tears, it's not good.

Yeah.

Malcolm, I'm sure you yourself had some preconceived notions about gun violence, the role of guns in America. How did your view on these topics, because not just one, crime, gun violence, regulation, etc., How did your views evolve as you were writing this book and meeting these people and telling these stories?

In lots of ways. I'll give you 2 examples. One was a simple one, but which really kind of like changed my understanding of what the American problem is. And that is that there's a very famous book written by a guy named Frank Zimring, a criminologist, called Crime Is Not the Problem, which was written back in the '90s, and I went back and reread it, and he makes this point which is so clear and kind of, um, fundamental to our— to my— to a better understanding of the crime problem. He says, look, there's 2 different things. There's crime and there's violence, and they're not the same. So crime is I go out in the street and somebody has broken into my car and stolen my bag, or someone's As someone has happened to me long ago, I went into a bookstore, someone took my iPhone, pulled it out of my bag. That's crime, right? Violence is I walk out the front door of this building and someone shoots me, right? And he's like, if you compare levels of crime between America and Western European countries, they're the same. In fact, in many ways, Paris has got a much bigger problem with theft and burglary than New York does.

You're much more likely to have your car stolen in Montreal than you are in Boston. Levels of crime, they fluctuate. What is different about America is violence. And violence is a very different set of people committing acts, criminal acts for very different reasons. It's violence in America that's off the charts. And we're constantly confusing these 2 things. We have politicians stand up and say, I'm tough on crime. And I want to say, well, wait a second, be more specific. What do you want to be tough on? We don't need to be tough on cars getting stolen. We're good, right? Montreal's way worse, or Toronto, or London. London, oh my God. But I want you to be specific. If you want to be tough on crime, be tough on violence, because that's where we are 3, 4, 5 times more serious than everybody else.

And what's your definition of violence?

It is somebody using some kind of potentially lethal act to resolve some dispute. That's what violence is.

Generally a firearm, correct?

In this country, a firearm. I mean, London, fists or a knife, but in this country, a firearm. Another thing that really opened my eyes was understanding that as a country, we are underpoliced.

Yes. And I'm going to talk to you about that because I found that—

Well, let's talk about it.

I found that so interesting. But can we— before we talk about that, can I cover some other ground? Yeah, yeah.

We'll come back to it.

I, you know, I think the crux of the book is that Americans don't fully understand the gun violence epidemic, and neither side is willing to be honest About the reality of the situation. So can you explain what you mean by that and how each side is, in your view, being dishonest?

Yeah. I mean, I define dishonesty pretty broadly. It is dishonest to pretend something's a big problem when it's a small problem, or vice versa. It is dishonest to avoid a conclusion because it's inconvenient to you. It's dishonest to pretend that you're serious about attacking someone when in fact you're engaging in frivolous activities.

Like performative rhetoric.

Performative rhetoric. So for example, I have a chapter on the Second Amendment, the amendment to the US Constitution which guarantees gun rights. Why is that conversation dishonest? It's dishonest because the US Supreme Court pretends that it's very serious about history and says, we wanna go back into American history, discover what the founders thought when they wrote the Second Amendment, and use that to guide our contemporary interpretation. They do not, the court does not do that. They do not go back into the history. They cherry-pick, they make up stuff. There's a whole chapter, a portion of that chapter where I go and talk to a linguist who studies the grammar of the 18th century English and ask her to analyze the Second Amendment through the eyes of when they wrote the particular sentence that's so problematic because—

A well-regulated militia.

A well-regulated militia being necessary to the defense of a free state, the right to bear arms should not be infringed or whatever that sentence is. I said, we're trying to make sense of this in 2026. What did they mean when they wrote that in 1786? A time— but 1786 is closer to Shakespeare than it is to us, right? So she goes through it, this incredibly hilarious, complicated analysis, and she points out that if you want to get serious about interpreting that, you got to know the grammar of the 18th century. And if you know the grammar of the 18th century, it is crystal clear what they meant. And what they meant is not the way the court is Interpreting it. Today. And so my point is the court's not being honest. They have the resources available to them to go back to the grammar of the 18th century. And if they're serious about interpreting that sentence the way it was understood by James Madison when he wrote it in the 1780s, they can do that. They haven't.

What did they mean? What did James Madison mean?

What he meant was something that is so far from our contemporary understanding. That amendment was written because slave owners in the South, in Virginia and South Carolina, were refusing to ratify the Constitution of the United States because they were concerned that the Constitution as written would make it difficult for them to keep having armed militias patrolling their plantations to keep their slaves in check. You have to understand that If you were a plantation owner in Virginia in 1780 or in South Carolina, the number of slaves in your area probably outnumbered the number of free white people by 10 or 20 to 1. What did that mean? That meant you were terrified, right? You went to bed every night worried that they would come into your house and overwhelm you and your family and kill you, right? So They go around. These are people who are profoundly anxious. And the way they dealt with that problem is they created militias, groups of armed white people, volunteers who rode around on horses and kept the slaves in check. The Constitution comes along and it appears from their reading of it that it's going to threaten their militias.

And they said, well, we're not— The Virginia delegates meet in Richmond and they basically say, we're not going to ratify this, you're going to make it impossible for us to keep our families safe. And so Madison, who is himself a Virginian and the son of a plantation owner who was killed by his slaves, by the way, Madison says, all right, I'll write you a constitution that takes away your— that guarantees you can keep your militia. I'll write you an amendment that guarantees you can keep your militias. That's where it comes from. Because militias are important for keeping the slaves in check, the right of citizens to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That's what it means.

It's so crazy to me, Malcolm, that people don't understand that, that that is not widely accepted and embraced by people who debate the Second Amendment today.

So a book, a guy named Carl Bogus, Really, really brilliant constitutional historian, a law professor, writes a book 20-some-odd years ago in which he outlines this argument so convincingly. By the way, this is not some weird, wacky guy. This is a serious academic drawing on considerable resources in the historical record, writes this book, which was taken very seriously by all kinds of scholars that the Supreme Court could read if it wanted to. He's still alive. They could have called him in and talked to him. All kinds of other people have backed him up. No interest.

But even in the public consciousness, I don't think that people put these things together.

Yeah. I have become over the course of my journalistic career, and I'm sure you had the same epiphany, took me about 30 years to get here. I just realized The short way of this is nobody reads to the end, which is my way of saying that increasingly, like we did a podcast series on the George Floyd murder, and it was all based on, I read the entire trial transcript of the police officers who were charged in his case. It's like 1,000 pages. I read the whole thing.

Wow.

Which wasn't that hard. It's actually really interesting. But after I finished reading it and I started reading through what people had written about the George Floyd case, I realized, oh, no one ever read the transcripts. Or if they did, they didn't read to the end. People just don't want to read to the end. I mean, the world is now full of so much information that it's impossible. And so anyone— it's increasingly rare for someone to come along and read to the end. I try to read to the end in the things that I'm working on.

How did your reading to the end of those transcripts change your view of what happened to George Floyd? And what do you think people were missing who didn't do that?

What they were missing was just how bad a— so the guy who was eventually charged and—

Derek Chauvin.

Derek Chauvin, yeah. To say that he's a bad apple is to radically understate. He's a guy who never should have been Hired, who should have been fired a long time ago, who repeatedly breaks police protocol. He— other— the other officers who were with him that night try to stop— the one officer in particular tries to stop him and just can't. He's not— he's a junior officer. He's like been on the force for like a week. Chauvin's a 20-year vet. This kid is there and is telling him over and again, no, what are you doing? This is crazy. And Chauvin's just out of his mind. I think what we did was the mistake you make if you don't read to the end is you think this is an indictment of the Minneapolis Police Department. It's not. I mean, it's only in the sense that they failed to fire him, but they were prevented. Their hands were tied by the union agreement. You realize, no, no, this is about—

One bad person.

How much damage one sociopath can do, not just to a police department, but to the entire country. And how—

And how one person can shape views and create these generalizations that may not be fair or accurate.

We came out of that with the wrong conclusion. We came out of that with the idea that there was something fundamentally wrong with American policing. I do not believe there is something fundamentally wrong with American policing, except, as we're going to get to, there's too few of them. In that case, there was something fundamentally wrong with Derek Chauvin. And if you read the entire trial transcript, there is no other conclusion. None.

You would think you'd know a scam when you saw one. But today, they often look like messages from your bank. your delivery service, your boss. One convincing message, one login page, and someone else is using your identity. CoverOn monitors your credit and personal data around the clock, alerting you the moment something looks off. And if a scam hits, expert recovery support, fraud insurance, and identity theft insurance have your back. Visit coveron.com/katie20 And use the code KATIE20 for up to 68% off, because recovering from a scam shouldn't be your full-time job. Let's draw the line, Malcolm, between these militias that we just discussed that were behind the Second Amendment and modern policing. That was really where— is the genesis, isn't it? These sort of slave capturers. There's a word for, a term for these folks who existed during periods where there was slavery in the United States. And how that— did that become a model for how policing in America eventually was designed?

I've heard this argument. And I have to say I'm a little dubious of it. Do I think that the evolution of some strands of American policing depends in or flows from the militias in the South? Maybe. But remember, they're not everywhere. They're in very specific parts of very specific Southern states. The country's a lot bigger than that. The evolution of northeastern police departments in Boston and New York and Philadelphia, that's not coming out of the slave patrols of the 18th century. That's coming out of something very different. Ideas that come from England with Sir Robert Peel's notion of what a metropolitan police force looks like commingled with, I mean, there's a huge kind of literature on, these were in the beginning, these were kind of ethnic jobs programs in America. It was like for the Irish and the Italians. So I don't know. I think it's more complicated, much more complicated than that. And I think that we have been much too quick to kind of, particularly recently, to denigrate the institution of policing in this country. There are clearly problems with it, but I don't feel like it is fundamentally flawed at its heart.

Let's talk about policing and then I'll go back to some of these other issues that you raise in the book. You do, in a section, make the connection between our gun violence epidemic and American policing. I thought this was so fascinating because it seems counter to conventional wisdom and certainly sort of philosophical debates that have surfaced, I think, in the last 10 years or so. You conclude that, as you just said, we need more police.

Mm-hmm.

Tell me, how you arrived at that conclusion and what evidence you used to back it up.

Yeah. Well, so I was very interested. The premise of the book is why is America not like its Western European peers when it comes to violence? Why are we different? So I began looking through all the differences. Well, one of the obvious differences, and many, many, many people have pointed this out over the years, although it weirdly is one of those facts that never bubbles up into the public consciousness, One of the big differences is how we spend our money on public safety. So Western European countries, Germany, France, what have you, and America spend the same percentage of their budgets, of their GDP on public safety. We spend the same amount of money on keeping our people safe as the Germans do and the French do. However, the Germans spend The huge majority of that money on the police and a tiny amount on prisons. We spend an enormous amount on prisons and a tiny amount on the police.

In fact, you cite specifically LA versus Berlin.

Which is so— so LA and Berlin are the same size. They're very similar. They're cosmopolitan, you know, blah, blah, blah. LA has in a good year 8,500 police officers. Berlin, 18,000, twice as many. And if you go through one American city after another and just match them up population-wise with cities in Europe, it's almost always the case that there's twice as many police on the ground in a European city as there is in an American city, which is astonishing. And then I called up this guy named Dan Oates, who was a police chief, a big city police chief for many years in this country. He did Palm Beach, he did, uh, he was high up in the NYPD, he did Aurora, Colorado. Um, and I just said to him— he's a very thoughtful guy— I called him up and I said, so European cities, if you were, if you were in Europe, if you're— when you were at Aurora, Colorado, if you'd been in Europe, that city, you'd have had twice as many cops. I think, so tell me, what, what would your life have been like with twice as many officers? And he was like, it was clear no one had ever asked him this question before.

It was—

And he was dying to answer it. And he just talked brilliantly for half an hour. I just turned on the tape recorder. He just went. And it was so eye-opening. He was like, oh my God, the things I would have loved to do. I could have had enough police officers that I could have had people in every community who could have gotten to know the key players, who could have learned about problems before they bubbled up to the surface. I could have had liaisons with the schools. To figure out which kids were in trouble and give them the help they need before they— I could have made sure on a Friday night when there's problems cropping up all over town that I could get my police there in 5 minutes as opposed to 20 minutes so they could end the argument before it spiraled out of control. I mean, he just went on and on, chapter and verse, and you realized what was going on in his police department and in police departments around the country is they're in a constant state of triage. They don't have time to do the things they want to do.

They're just rushing from one problem to another. They don't have time to get out of the car and talk to people. They don't have time to slow down and get to know a, you know, a local pastor who knows all kinds of people in that community and who can be a source for them to make sure they, you know, are going to the right places when they need to. They got none of that. They're trapped in their car with the lights on, racing from one problem to the next. That is not how you do effective policing. And it is so frustrating to the police because that's not the way they want to operate either, right? They don't think their job is racing around town with the lights on. They got into that profession because they want to help people.

And they want to do things that are more preventive than reactive.

Exactly.

And that's where community policing comes in.

Yeah.

And I'm curious, you know, obviously, the way the police do their jobs catapulted into the public's imagination after the George Floyd murder.

Yeah.

But also there were incidents prior to that that was sort of— they were bubbling and people were starting to think something's wrong here with the way police are doing their job. At that time, after George Floyd's murder, Gallup found that 47% of Americans supported or somewhat supported reducing police department budgets, but they also supported shifting the money to social programs. And that number increased to 70% among Black Americans. So are you saying this reducing the police budget was the wrong reaction if people were really talking about using that budget to do some of the things that you just described?

I think you do both. So the real issue here is prisons.

Yeah, I was going to ask you before that. There's so many layers to unpeel here. How did the balance get so out of whack in America?

So that's where the money is.

Because of these private prisons or is it—

Just the sheer scale of the prison network in this country.

Industrial complex.

Yeah.

And the number of people we have behind bars, which On a per capita basis, dwarfs that of our Western European counterparts. Putting someone in prison is incredibly expensive. And so we have this huge prison system, which is insanely expensive, which sucks up all the dollars, and there's nothing left. What I would say is yes to absolutely to more community resources, but you don't take it out of the budget of the police department. They're also strapped for people and resources. I think you take all of that money that's over there being devoted to prisons and start diverting it to both those things. So I recently, for my podcast, did a big project in Baltimore because Baltimore is the American city that has reduced its homicide rate the most. I mean, extraordinary reductions over the last couple of years. And they've done that by devoting an enormous amount of, not actually not an enormous amount of resources, by very intelligently devoting resources to understanding who's at risk for violence and stepping in and talk— having conversations with kids who might otherwise retaliate for the murder of their cousin last week, right? Which is what homicide is. It's a lot of that interpersonal stuff.

And that has meant creating a kind of uh, coalition between trusted community voices, pastors, outreach workers, counselors, uh, you know, and police. Getting— so they all get to know each other. They work together. They have meetings every week. They, they work through cases together. They go and visit people, kids who are caught up in something they shouldn't be. They'll— the police officer will go with a outreach worker and with the kid's pastor who knows the kid's father, and they'll show up together. That's, that's what works.

Or they'll play basketball. You know, I did a story when I was, uh, a few years ago about a community policing program. I wish I could remember what city it was in, but it was precisely this model. And not only that, Malcolm, but the police officers lived in the community. They not only spent time there, but they were a part of the community. And they would play basketball with the kids after school. I mean, it was such a different approach. And that's really what you're talking about. If that is so effective, why haven't more police departments adopted that? Is it numbers? Or what is it?

In part, it's numbers. In part, it is that it's difficult. It's funny, I talk about this in this series I'm doing on Baltimore. Baltimore's The strategy of attacking homicides was presented to Baltimore in 1997 and they adopted it in 2020.

What took so long?

Well, everything takes so long. I mean, show me the innovation that doesn't take forever. This is part of the thing I'm trying to address in the book is if you don't have an honest understanding of what your problem is, it's very hard for you to adopt innovation. If you think we have too many police, why on earth would you back a proposal which calls for more resources going to the police? If you think our problem is crime writ large and not just violence, why would you back a program which is narrowly focused on reducing violence among young people? You know, on and on and on. If you think that there is some right to guns granted by our constitutional forefathers, Why on earth would you take seriously a program which tries to get kids to refrain from using guns to solve disputes? I mean, I could go on. All of these misconceptions we have have downstream consequences, and we've been living those downstream consequences now for generations.

You believe that more police officers is the answer?

Part of it. Not—

I was going to say, but there's got to be more than that, right?

Absolutely.

You know, you said earlier, and I thought my ears pricked up, I thought, well, Malcolm can't believe that it's just the number of police officers. Because would you concede that training is an issue? Do you believe that implicit bias and racism does impact the way people react to certain situations? I mean, you're a behavioral scientist, for crying out loud. You must think it's kind of a multifactorial situation, right?

Yeah, yeah. I do believe that, of course, but I don't think that policing in that sense is any different than any other profession. I think every profession is affected by that. We're all human beings.

But I think with policing it has sometimes deadly consequences, right?

No, but all of those things that we're talking about, I think, get easier to address in an environment where the police are not under such constraints. So you just said earlier, 2 minutes ago you talked about that show you did and the police were playing basketball in the community with the kids. Well, if you go to any major metropolitan police department right now, if you look at the amount of money they're spending on overtime, it's enormous. Why? Because they don't have enough officers and they compensate for that just by making guys work longer hours.

Right.

Well, if you're working X number of overtime hours every week? Are you going to have time to go and play basketball with— no. There's all kinds of things you can't do because you're stretched so thin. You're working 60 hours a week.

And talk about the propensity toward violence when you are strapped for resources and for enough people to do the job.

This is one of those eye-opening things. I discovered this, read the study by 2 sociologists at Harvard, self-described socialists, which is an important point here, a guy named Adena Usami and a guy named Chris Wright. And they wrote this really brilliant paper that talked about the consequences of underpolicing. And they looked internationally and they do a simple chart. The heart of their work is a simple chart. And what they did is they said, let's rank all the countries in the world by how many police they have, police per capita. And then let's rank all the countries in the world by how violent their police are, right? How much police brutality is there? How many people are shot by the police? What do you find when you do that? The most violent, uh, police forces in the world are all found in the countries with the least number of police per capita. The more police you have, the better behaved your police are. Right. And why is that? Because if you are overwhelmed and undermanned, how do you project authority? By making a big splash. You roar in with the lights on, you come charging out with all of your weapons, you grab the kid and you throw 'em to the ground.

What do you think ICE does? That's how they operate, right? 'Cause they're going into a, what they perceive to be in a hostile environment and they flex their muscles and they say, we're really badasses. And they wave their guns around and they pull up their masks. And they pretend that they're like some kind of elite strike force, right? They behave like soldiers, not like police officers. If I am numerous, if I know that I'm not outmanned, if I have a— if, if there are enough of us that I can have a real relationship with a community, when there is an incident, I don't roll up that way, right? I get out of the car like a normal human being with my other police officers. And I know the person because I work this community. And I go, I say, what's going on here? I'm not waving my gun around like a lunatic. I think people have— I'm not saying that every problem is cured by hiring more police, but I'm saying you can't start the solution without solving the fact that alone among Western nations, we have decided to construct Police forces that are tiny.

Why? What?

It just makes no sense.

Were you surprised by that when you looked at the numbers?

Stunned. And I, I went through and I, I, when I was writing the chapter of this book, I started asking everyone I know the following. I would use that example. I would say Berlin and LA are the same size. LA has 8,500 police officers. Guess how many Berlin has? I must have asked 100 people. Only 2 people out of 100 Answer that question correctly. One was my nephew who was applying to be a police officer. He was like— and had just come back from Germany because he loves Germany. He's like, oh, they got way more officers there. And the other was my friend Terry, who's like the smartest person I've ever met. So we're talking 8,500 versus 18,000 in Berlin.

Are there differences in training? Because I know that in Germany they're required to study the way police were complicit in the prosecution of Jews during World War II. And police in Germany also have to visit a concentration camp.

Oh, that's really—

I did not know that.

Isn't that interesting? But did you think about looking at the differences in training in addition to the differences in sheer numbers?

Yeah. Oh yeah, I've often thought about this because when I go home to Canada and hang out with— my mom still lives in Canada, my brother. We live in this little place called Kitchener-Waterloo. And the first thing I always notice is that the police cars are not black or dark, some dark color. They're a light color, which seems like a silly thing to point out. And then there's a slogan on the back which says, you know, something, something police force. And the slogan says, people helping people. That's— it's not to serve and protect or to It's people helping people, which goes to your point. The culture of policing in Canada is very different. The notion is that the police officer is your friend who's there to help you. And those kinds of cultural things I do think make a big difference. That's also a piece of restoring the relationship between the The great father of modern policing is Robert Peel, this English reformer, police reformer, who starts the London police force in the late 18th century, early 19th century. And he had what are called Peel's Principles, which were 10 things that police should live by.

And they're extraordinary to read them because they're as true today as they were when he wrote them. But one of them is, The people are the— the police are the people and the people are the police. Meaning a police force succeeds to the extent that it is like everyone else, part of the community, not distinct from the community. That's a really beautiful idea.

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In London, is it true that police officers don't carry guns?

Correct. Yeah.

Can you explain that and why?

Well, in a— in a—

is that because of Mr. Peel?

It's because of Mr. Peel, but it's also because they don't have a lot of— you only have to carry guns if You suspect that a large portion of your criminal population already has guns, so you need to have an equal playing field. Because they're pretty sure that that's not the case in London or in England, the cops don't have to carry a gun.

How do we loosen the grip that Americans have or our politicians have on this prison industrial complex? I mean, is it lobbying? Is it just a misunderstanding of crime and punishment in this country? Why are we so in love with prisons?

I don't know.

I wish I knew better. That should be your next book.

Yeah.

I've always been baffled by this. I mean, a typical homicide is this. I'm 18. I live in a bad neighborhood somewhere. Somebody Shot my brother. I'm really angry. I go out one night, I get a little drunk, I run into the guy who shot my brother, and I shoot him back. I've just described some significant portion of homicides in this country. Our theory, operating theory, is if I increase the, uh, penalty for first-degree murder from 20 years in prison to life in prison, I will deter that young man from taking revenge in that manner. Does that make any sense? No, it makes no sense whatsoever. That kid's not thinking about getting caught. He's not thinking about the penalties. He's not thinking about the difference between 20 years in prison and life in prison. He's angry and is trying to resolve a dispute in this kind of screwed up way. So there's a disconnect. We have this notion that Criminal sanctions of that sort are an effective way of deterring criminal behavior, and they're just not. The swiftness of punishment and the certainty of punishment can be deterrents, but I don't know whether the severity of— and many criminologists will agree with me that swiftness and certainty are much better deterrents than severity of punishment.

And so we've We're putting people in prison forever and there's no good argument for it. And plus we're putting too many people in prison for things that— there's much more meaningful ways, I think, of punishing people than locking them up for 30 years.

We just talked about London. So you believe there are too many guns in this country. And in fact, when I did that documentary, I think we said there are more guns And more gun stores in this country than Starbucks and McDonald's combined.

Wow. I did not know that number.

Which I thought was so shocking. So I guess the question is, do fewer guns lead to less gun violence in your view? Because boy, it sounds like it does in London.

Yes. So, but this is, this is where I have many, many mixed feelings about gun control as a strategy. In the abstract, if I were to remove guns from America, would we have less homicide? 100%. There's zero doubt about that. You know, to go back to that typical homicide I just described, the one kid is angry because his brother got killed, goes out and extracts revenge. That scenario happens in London, except that— or Germany— except that maybe the brother wasn't killed, but just because he wasn't shot, he was— maybe he just got beat up. And now the brother is still mad and wants revenge, but he's not shooting his brother's attacker. He's beating up his brothers. He's using his fists, or he's using a knife at worst. He's not using a gun. He doesn't have a gun, right? So now we have injuries. We don't have homicides. So the severity is not that the social circumstances that cause homicides don't exist in other countries. It's the consequence of the argument is not as profound. So if we had no guns, we would have a lot more arguments resolved with fists and knives, and that would be preferable, right?

100%.

How do you achieve that? That's where therein lies the rub for you. But you believe that gun control advocates or gun safety as it's now commonly called, have approached this in the wrong way. How so? One way I know, you believe that the assault weapons ban—

It's just a ridiculous waste of time.

Why?

Because assault rifle bans don't ban assault rifles. Again, you got to read to the end. Just read a bill that just, you know, you can go into the Senate website and you can read the latest bill that's been introduced to Ban assault rifles. Just read it. They don't ban assault rifles. What they, what they do is an assault rifle, or what we call an assault weapon, is, uh, distinguished by the fact that it has— it's like a bit of Lego. It's, it's modular. You can—

It's a suit-up.

Yeah, all kinds of things can— you can remove the stock and buy another one on the internet. You can remove the magazine and buy another one on the internet. You can remove the little grenade holder and buy another one on the internet. Assault rifle bans simply limit the number of those cosmetic add-ons that you're allowed to buy and use. That's all they do.

But what's wrong with that? I mean, I think about Gabby Giffords, Malcolm, who was, you know, was at that grocery store at a Saturday event. The perpetrator of the crime had an assault weapon. multiple magazines, was ready to reload, got tackled, and as a result, there was less carnage.

Yeah.

So, so I'm like, well, okay, I, I— so I don't follow you when you say—

Most fatalities from mass shootings, first of all, are from handguns, not from assault rifles. So the handgun is really the issue here.

I agree, but, but hey, if, if assault weapons can exact a lot of damage in a very small amount of time, and you just press the trigger and it goes ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, and you can kill multiple people.

You can't fire an assault rifle any faster than you can fire any semi-automatic weapons. Many people confuse machine guns with civilian-style assault weapons, which are very different. They do not have a The capacity to automatic fire. You fire them the same way you fire handguns.

It's a semi-automatic.

Semi-automatic.

You have to hit it. But it has multiple magazines. Listen, I'm not a gun expert.

One of the things you can do is to outfit automatic weapons with larger magazines. And sometimes the assault rifle bans limit the size of the magazines you can use. That sounds like it's a really big deal. But I went— I had a— I spent a day on a— at a shooting range in North Carolina with an expert, um, gun guy, really fascinating guy. And he was showing me the effect of that particular bit of legislation. So let's say we ban any magazine of more than 20 rounds, right? So you can't put that— you can't buy that and put that on your assault weapon. It's not like that slows up the shooter. Dramatically. Anyone who's reasonably skilled can change a magazine in a blink of an eye. He just showed me. He's like, boom, he's got a new magazine in there. If that's what you're doing is expending an extraordinary amount of political capital in order to limit the incredibly specific rare instance where there might be a difference in our ability to to tackle a shooter because he's changing in that split second his magazine every 20 rounds and not every 30 rounds. You really want— you really think that's worth it?

That's like, we're now at the margins.

Who were with Gabby Giffords probably thought it was worth it.

Katie, the problem that we're dealing with is ginormous. We should not be nibbling at the fringes And pretending we're somehow kind of making a meaningful difference. What I'm saying is, why are we wasting our time on something that at best is a marginal fix? There's an elephant in the room.

Which is the handgun.

Which is handguns. And if you talk to gun control people about assault weapons, they are not honest. They're pretending they're doing something that they're not doing.

So what should be done vis-à-vis the elephant in the room, the handgun?

I think a really useful thing to do with handguns would be to start talking about suicide. More people use guns to commit suicide than they do to kill another person in this country. Way more. Suicide by gun is arguably one of the biggest public health problems that we have in this country. And I think reframing the gun argument around suicide would be really, really useful. Because it's a lot harder to stand up and talk about gun rights when we're talking about incredibly vulnerable people who have taken their own life with a handgun. Why? Because the handgun was right there.

What would that lead to, in your view? Making it more difficult to purchase a handgun? Background checks? Mental health evaluations? Like, what—

Many of the things that we're already doing, plus some others, I think would be far more effective as a public policy argument if they were implemented and suggested in the context of suicide. I just would stop talking about homicide whatsoever. It hasn't worked. How many years are we into the fight in this country? I mean, we're generations in and we're going backwards. The Supreme Court, the last 2 gun control, gun rights rulings of the Supreme Court have made it more difficult to pass gun control, not easier. We're trying the same thing over and over again and it's not working, right? So it's time for a reboot, and I think the reboot should be around suicide.

Malcolm, can you talk about the perceptions in the Black community and how they have taken hold, uh, and, and, and how it has shaped their views not only about policing but about Gun violence writ large.

I had a long conversation not long ago with Brandon Scott, mayor of Baltimore, the youngest mayor in Baltimore's history, African American, grew up in Park Heights, which is not a good neighborhood in Baltimore, and grew up, as he says, in the '80s and '90s in Baltimore, which is, as he says, the worst time to grow up. as a young Black man in America, in American history. I mean, after slavery, of course. And it is under his watch that Baltimore has made these extraordinary strides in combating gun violence. And what he will tell you, what he said to me, is that one, he grew up under the previous regime, under the idea, in the era when we believed that the way to stop homicide was just to arrest everyone. And he learned firsthand how fruitless that was and how stupid that was. He told me he was arrested 7 times between the ages of 13 and 21. This is a guy who's not a gangbanger. He's a good student and an athlete. And they would just sweep through the neighborhood and throw him on the ground and put him under handcuffs. And so it was his frustration with those experiences that led him when he became mayor to say, we need a new approach to this.

We need to find a way to work closely, to bring the police in cooperation with other resources in the community to work on a person-by-person basis to find out who's at risk for homicide and talk them down off the ledge.

Right.

So the key, in answer to your question, he will say, I'm the first guy to take this problem really seriously because I'm the first person who lived it. And he went through a list of every other mayor of Baltimore who had come before him. Nobody grew up in that era, in Park Heights, the way he did. They were all from the suburbs or from middle-class families. So because he grew up with it, he takes it seriously in a way no one else does. And his argument would be, People have become— most Americans have been so divorced from the reality of this issue. They haven't taken it seriously. They've pretended they have. And arresting everybody is pretending you're taking the problem seriously. It's not really taking the problem seriously.

Well, what about those sweeps? I mean, isn't that an indictment not only on the numbers of police in this country, but the way they do business?

It is the enactment of a failed and impoverished crime-fighting strategy that is given to the police. Remember, the police are enacting ideas that are given to them by mayors, by DAs, by Congress, by— we had a set of ideologies in this country that informed how we instructed the police to reduce crime.

Which was?

Which was you go in with a heavy hand and you arrest everybody in sight and you measure your success by how many people you arrest. At the height of Baltimore's problems in the '90s, this is what Scott told me, it was a city of 600,000 people. They were arresting 100,000 people a year out of 600,000. Do you know what they do? Do you know what the number is now? At a time when the murder rate has dropped by threefold, they'll have 17,000 arrests this year, roughly. They've gone from 100,000 to 17,000, and their murder rate has dropped from 350 to under 100.

Wow.

That's just— that's a different idea, right? And it comes from someone who has a very different perspective on what it means to take care of crime, and who is coming from that community and saying, we're not hostile to policing, we're hostile to bad policing. We want police to come in. We just want them to behave in an intelligent and thoughtful manner when they combat this. He said to me at the end of the conversation, he's like— I said, why does it work in Baltimore and it hasn't worked everywhere else? And he goes, because it's my first priority, my second priority, my third priority, my fourth priority, and my fifth priority. And no other previous mayor would ever have said that. And everyone knows, and I'm going to use his language here, everyone knows that if you aren't on the fucking program, you're out of here. So that's the way to think about it. This is a community that was hungry for a solution and they're finally, I think, getting it.

If that has been so successful, have there been other mayors who are paying attention to the way Baltimore is doing Yeah, I think it's happening.

I mean, I talked to— there's a really brilliant guy named David Kennedy who I had a long conversation with recently, who's for years has been fighting this fight. And he had a lot of trouble getting people's ear. He's been— when I say fighting the fight— for 30 years fighting this fight. It's— I think the tide is finally starting to turn. New York City was a key part of this because New York had a real come-to-Jesus moment. When the court outlawed stop and frisk.

Right. I was going to ask you about stop and frisk.

Everyone said, this is a disaster. We're going to go back to being the bad old '90s. This is what brought down the crime rate. And what happened after the court outlawed stop and frisk? Crime fell even more. In fact, crime started falling even faster because the police realized, oh, that was a terrible strategy. That's not the way you fight. crime and homicide. You got to be targeted and smart about it. And so I think that was a key moment in changing the narrative about crime prevention.

So now that these sort of opposite sides, the, the pro-gun advocates and the right to bear arms, you know, gun rights advocates, and those who believe we have to do something that makes sense to reduce gun violence in this country. How do you reframe the debate and what are the things that both sides should be honest about that will potentially lead to real solutions?

Yeah. Yeah. I think we need to be honest about the fact that our problem at root, the thing that distinguishes us from our Western peers is that we're resolving too many arguments with guns, and we need to find a way to give the people who are having those arguments a more forgiving way to manage their disputes and grievances. And if you can do that, then I think you reframe it and you say, we've been having all these other arguments. They are important arguments. We'll continue to have them. But let's both agree for the time being that the problem we got to solve right now is that. And we could do it any number of ways. We can do it the way they're doing in Baltimore. I describe in my book a program working with young men in Chicago, which is all about teaching them conflict resolution skills. That stuff sounds really, really—

Woo-woo.

Woo-woo. It's not. It has been verified scientifically as reducing levels of gun violence down the line. The Baltimore stuff has brought the Baltimore homicide rate way down. Those aren't— these are not partisan activities. They're just saying, look, this is the low-hanging fruit right now. Let's just attack that. We can deal with the broader stuff, the big picture stuff later. But right now the problem's out of control. And we shouldn't be having these kind of esoteric ideological disputes about what the founders did and didn't think. I mean, it's the kind of— the idea— I can't describe to you how enraging it was for anyone to read the court's decision, for example, in Bruen, and realize they didn't mention suicide. It's just like, you just realize there's an argument going on up here that is out of touch with the reality of what guns are doing to this country. And so we just have to, like, move on. It shouldn't be— they're a lost cause. If you pin your hopes on the court riding to your rescue, it's not happening in our lifetime. Imagine if I was a standard Democratic candidate for mayor in a big American city, and I stood up on the campaign trail and I said, we have too few cops in this city.

And, uh, I'd like way more. And I promise you, if I get way more, I'm going to have them do really constructive things in the community, and I'm going to have them create all kinds of links with other groups, and I'm going to rethink how we do policing. And I don't think of this as a democratic issue anymore. I'm just doing this because I think this is the best, you know. Was that— would argument have, have some, uh, credence, get traction? I think so. I think there is an opportunity for people to carve out a middle ground on this. I think that could happen tomorrow as opposed to some of these other ideas which are going to happen when I'm dead and buried.

Did this book make you want to move to Germany?

No, I like it here. It made me wish we were a lot more open as a country to learning from our peers and neighbors. And they— because they learn from us. I mean, every day people in Germany look to the United States for ideas about how to do things better. And we should do the same.

Malcolm Gladwell, the book is The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic. And what you mean by that, it's an epidemic of our own creation.

Yeah.

Thanks so much. Great to see you, Malcolm.

It's good to see you again.

Next Question is a production of Katie Couric Media and Acast. The executive producers are me, Katie Couric, and Courtney Litz. Our producers are Adriana Fazio and Julia Lewis, and our production coordinator is Alyssa Horowitz. Julian Weller composed our theme music. For more information about today's episode or to sign up for my newsletter Wake Up Call, visit us at KatieCouric.com and follow me on Substack and all the other social media platforms.