A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Jens Ludwig is an economist at the University of Chicago, and for years, he's been obsessed with one of America's most intractable problems - gun violence. Our colleague Adrian Ma over at The Indicator has more.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: For a long time, Jens Ludwig says, the conventional wisdom we've been told about gun violence has followed this predictable pattern.
JENS LUDWIG: Both the left and the right share the view that gun violence is sort of premeditated and deliberate.
MA: But when Jens and his colleagues at the University of Chicago began gathering data on shootings in the city, a different picture emerged.
LUDWIG: Most of these shootings are basically - like, they start with words. They're arguments that escalate and end in tragedy 'cause someone's got a gun.
MA: The events that led to most of these shootings were not carefully planned by mass shooters. They weren't the stuff of TV drama. Often, Jens says, the causes are just a lot more mundane.
LUDWIG: Guy gets off the train, walking down the street, accidentally steps on another guy's sneaker.
MA: And here is where Jens says a big aha moment came. It's a behavioral economics problem. And one of the big insights from behavioral economics is that when people are put in extremely high-stress situations, we often do not think rationally.
LUDWIG: I really have come to think of gun violence as, like, normal human frailty that we all experience in moments of high stress.
MA: If a huge cause of gun violence is just our common human frailty, what can we do about that? I know some of you are saying, what about gun control? If you reduce the number of guns, you reduce gun violence. Well, Jens says, hypothetically, sure.
LUDWIG: But nobody has that button to push to make the 400 million guns in America disappear any time soon. There's a different thing that we can do, which is try and address the violence part of this.
MA: One strategy is simply to teach people. So, for example, there's this program for middle and high school boys called Becoming a Man. And basically, what they do is help boys learn what are called social cognitive skills - how to, you know, regulate their emotions and de-escalate conflicts. And Jens and his colleagues have studied the Chicago branch of this program. And what they found was boys who went through it were less likely to be arrested for carrying guns and about 50% less likely to be arrested for a violent offense.
LUDWIG: Which is a huge reduction.
MA: Strategy two - help change people's environments. And this can be illustrated by a study Jens points to that included researchers from the University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, like many Rust Belt cities, has a lot of vacant abandoned lots, and they worked with the city to raise money and hold a lottery to choose which of these lots would be cleaned up and converted into pocket parks.
LUDWIG: And the first thing that they could see is that people were way more likely to be out in public when scary vacant lot is turned into a charming little pocket park. So that's getting more people out and about so that they can basically serve as eyes on the street to help de-escalate things, right? And the second thing they can see in the police data is that there's a really big reduction in shootings around those areas. You know, depending on the neighborhood that you're looking at, these are, like, 10- to 30% reductions in shootings. And so the solutions are not what we thought. We can see that it's much more fixable. Let's see the problem for what it is, and, like, let's get going starting yesterday.
MA: Adrian Ma, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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