It’s almost Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer, and the season when we see gun violence cases rise nationally, across the country. This is a predictable increase every year, leading to more media stories and government conversations about what can be done to reverse the trend.
Gun violence is a uniquely American problem. According to data from the CDC, our murder rate today is about the same as in 1900. It leads many to ask: Why is this? And what can we do differently?
Unfortunately, the way we’ve thought about gun violence has made the politics of progress nearly impossible. The even bigger problem is we’ve been thinking about gun violence all wrong.
The most politically contentious part of the debate has been about gun control. Guns, on the one hand, make violent crime much more deadly, but at the same time, can also be used for self-defense against crime. I’ve spent most of my professional life looking at the economics of crime—especially gun violence—and how to prevent it. The best available data—full disclosure: I was one of the researchers who conducted this study—suggests that if there was a way to somehow get rid of the 400 million guns we have in the U.S. (a country of 330 million people), on balance, things would get substantially safer. That’s led to a lot of debate over gun control that has become unproductive, especially at the national level. (There’s no shortage of examples; a left-of-center think-tank’s article on the NRA’s political messaging entitled “Guns, Lies and Fear;” the NRA accusing President Biden of “coddling criminals”—the list goes on.) That, in turn, has led lots of people to conclude that, if gun control is stalled, we can’t solve gun violence.
But what that perspective misses is that the main effect guns have on gun violence is to make violence more deadly. 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.
Read More: Guns Are Not Just a Public Health Problem
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.”
This connects to one of the most important lessons from behavioral economics, as summarized in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. All of us engage in two types of cognition, but we’re only aware of one. The “voice in our head” that we usually think of as “thinking” is indeed rational, deliberate and calculating. (Kahneman calls it “system 2.”) But that type of thinking is also slow and enormously mentally taxing. So our minds have all developed to also carry out a different type of thinking—“system 1”—that happens below the level of consciousness, a set of automatic responses that are designed to work well for routine, low-stakes things we encounter daily, but can get us into trouble when over-generalized into high-stakes situations—like when a gun is present.
What’s more, behavioral economics suggests that our deviations from rational, deliberate behavior has some predictable structure. That includes emotional, violent behavior—even the most serious forms of violence. For example, all of our minds have a tendency to “catastrophize,” or make negative events seem even worse than they are. The feeling that “nothing in the world is worse than letting this person in front of me get away with this” is something we’ve all had. But when a gun is present there is indeed something worse than the other person getting away with it; that “something” involves someone dead and someone in jail.
Read More: 6 Proven Ways to Reduce Gun Violence
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%.
That also means policies that make our communities and neighborhoods more open—even something as small as encouraging more adults to spend more time outdoors—can help defuse conflicts. The impacts can be remarkably large: policies like ensuring every neighborhood has some commercial spaces interspersed with residential uses, cleaning up vacant lots or abandoned houses, or even improving street lighting have been found to generate 20%, 30%, and even up to 50% reductions in violence and shootings. It also keeps the costs typically low.
The great thing about prevention is that it sidesteps all the political fights over gun control and “root causes” and, for that matter, what the right prison penalties should be after a terrible crime has already been committed. Now there’s no victim or shooter in the first place.
For over 100 years, we’ve been arguing about whether our solutions should focus on carrots or sticks when gun violence largely doesn’t seem to respond much to incentives at all. Progress on this seemingly intractable problem is indeed possible, but we have to understand that what we have been doing in the past comes at the problem wrong. By using behavioral economics tools—many of which are proven, and low-cost—we can stop most of gun violence before it starts.
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