What is it that you think specifically we are refusing to see about America's gun violence?
Our problem in this country is not crime. Our problem is violence. You teach children as young as fourth grade how to treat gunshot wounds. We've lost track in America of just how far out on a limb we are. And that's why so many people have called for defunding the police. I think that's exactly backwards. The most important thing to understand is there is something you can do about it.
Hi there. Warm welcome to you all. Thank you for joining me here on the Oprah podcast. Well, my guest today is — I just — he's one of the smartest people on earth, literally. And he's a driver of the cultural conversation for many years now, challenging what we think we know about our most deeply held beliefs. And now Malcolm Gladwell, that's who's here today, has done it again. This time about an issue that has really weighed heavily for me, and I'm sure it has also weighed for a lot of you, too. It's America's obsession with guns and the utter devastation those guns have wrought on our country. So, welcome to the tea house, Malcolm Gladwell.
I read this book in one sitting.
I was texting you while I was reading the text. Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know. Is that irritating when somebody —
No, I was like, 'Look who just texted me.'
No, I read it in one sitting, The American Way of Killing, and I have to say my eyes were open in ways that I didn't even expect. What drove you to explore gun violence? You say it's, you know, it's the invention of an epidemic we have here.
Well, I've been writing about it my whole career, one way or another.
I wrote about it in Blink. I wrote about it in Tipping Point — a chapter was about the declining crime in New York.
I think it's because — I say this in the introduction to the book. I grew up in rural Canada.
And I was obsessed as a child with the United States. This place I'd never been to.
Life magazine. That was your picture of who we were. Yeah.
And it seemed so exotic, so fascinating, so exciting. And I was struck by how dangerous it was. I would read, you know, Time magazine every week as an eight-year-old, and there were all of these stories about people being killed. And in Canada in the '70s, that's an incredibly unusual thing.
Literally a foreign concept.
Yeah.
Foreign — I never knew anyone who had ever been shot, or I never knew anyone who had a gun. I never knew anyone who had been murdered.
So your news stories in the evening on your local news in Canada were not about the number of people shot.
We didn't have a TV, believe it or not. But when I went to someone's house, they would show the newscast from Buffalo, which were all about fires and crimes. But Toronto never had that. I mean, it was so — it was just — I grew up fascinated by this fact that here we have this neighbor which looks like our country. The people are the same. We worship the same God and eat the same food and drive the same cars, but down there there's a whole lot of killing going on. And up here, there is not. And I didn't understand why.
I think this paragraph on page 226 reads like a mission statement for the book. You write, 'The American way of killing is the story of a country that has lost its way. The United States is a place of extraordinary wealth. Its scientists and entrepreneurs and intellectuals are the envy of the world. Yet it suffers from a level of lethal violence that would be unthinkable among any of its peers in the developed world.' You're saying two things can be true at once. America is the envy of the world and also what —
It's baffling, I think, to the rest of the world. I think people legitimately — I don't know whether Americans are aware of the extent to which people from other countries like Canada or Europe — I was just in Finland last week and people were asking me this question.
Just are just kind of beyond — it's beyond puzzlement. It's a kind of, 'What is going on there?'
And was there a moment in your research when something you had always believed about American violence turned out to be wrong? What shifted for you in the writing?
So many things, but I'll give you one example. I have always known that the amount of money that the United States and other Western countries spend on public safety — cops and prisons and criminal justice system — is roughly the same, right? There's not big differences in how much.
But what I discovered in writing this book was in the United States, we spend this much on prisons and this much on police. And in Europe, they spend this much on police and this much on prisons.
I know. I was fascinated by that, too.
LA and Berlin are the same size.
LA has, I think, 8,500 police officers. Berlin has 17,000. I thought America was sort of overpoliced. Turns out, no, no, we're over-prisoned. A European police chief coming to America would say, 'Where are your police? How on earth do you expect to have a good relationship with the community, to know what people are worried about, to take care of people if your cops are running around in their cars all day because they're overworked and undermanned?' Yeah.
That was a real eye-opener for me.
Yeah. You use the example, I think it's Aurora, Colorado, where that example —
I talked to the police chief. Yeah.
He's a very well-known police chief in America. I called him up and I said, 'What would happen in your town if you had European levels of police?' In other words, if I gave you twice as many police officers. And he went on — he talked without stopping 40 minutes. It was such an eye-opening conversation. He just — he clearly thought about this over and over and over again. And no one had ever asked him this question. He'd been waiting his entire career for someone to say, 'What would you do with more police?' And he talked about things like, I would have the freedom to have police officers walking the streets and getting to know people in the community. I would have — I could find out about problems before they bubble to the surface. I could make sure that on a Saturday night it didn't take 20 minutes to get to the scene of a crime, that it took five minutes. I could identify the parts of my city that are hard for the police to get to and make sure they can always get — I mean, he went on and on and on and on. And his point was, if I had more police, I could be better at my job, and that I could be closer to the community, I could have my finger on the problems that are happening in my town. He couldn't understand why we would have put ourselves — a wealthy country would put ourselves in a situation where we are underinvesting in the prevention of crime and overinvesting in penalizing people once we catch them.
A lot of what the police do is common sense management of behavior. It's not arresting people. You don't measure the value of a police force by the number of people they arrest. We know that that's a bad way to think about it — the right way. So I was talking to a guy who spent a lot of time — a researcher, a criminologist. He was traveling with the Chicago PD and he was talking about what do they do in a typical evening. And he said, for example, we saw a man and a woman, clearly partners, man and wife, maybe having a really, really angry argument. Nothing had happened yet, but something could happen. The police officer sees this, stops, goes over, talks to them, calms them down,
sees her back against the fence. Yeah.
Sees her back against the fence. Sends the man home and says, you know, dude, you got to cool off.
You got to de-escalate. Yeah.
And so what that was doing — but because the police officer was there and present, he was able to potentially stop a crime that might have happened 10 minutes or 15 minutes later. And that's the right way to think about what the police can do. They are mediators in the community who can use other community resources to help people get through these difficult moments when they resort to violence.
And yet for many in this country, it's not how people think about the police. They think about the police as being there to, you know, aggravate a situation, and that's why so many people have called for defunding the police. And do you think that people have gotten that wrong?
I think we're confusing two things. When we talk about defunding the police, what we're talking about is an objection to the police using force, to the police —
brutality and projecting their power in a way that's aggressive. And that is a legitimate issue. But one of —
And I think people feel that if you have less police, then you would have less of that.
I think that's exactly backwards. In fact, there's a brilliant study that was done by these two guys at Harvard who are the furthest thing from conservatives. They're in fact self-identified socialists, and they make this argument that around the world levels of police brutality are highest in places where the police are fewest. But if you're a police officer, being violent or aggressive is the thing you do when you're outgunned, when there's not enough of you around, when you're outnumbered by the people you're trying to control. If you have lots of police, they're not under that same kind of stress and pressure. They don't have to project their energy in that way. They can be — it's easier to be calm. That was an incredible fundamental insight that made me really rethink a lot of what I thought about crime.
Well, you know, I've never fired a gun, and I wondered — I was intrigued by your description of your firing a gun. Was that your first time firing a gun?
went to a firing range in the middle of the countryside in North Carolina with a gun expert.
And what did you learn from physically experiencing firing a gun about its power that you couldn't have learned from everything you've ever read about guns?
It's funny because I literally, Oprah, never even picked up a gun.
Yeah. Which is — but it's an odd thing for me to say since I've been writing about criminal violence for —
But you never even like picked up a gun.
I never even held a gun. I don't know if I've ever even — I mean, I'd seen one on TV. But so I go up to this guy, lovely guy who's a serious gun expert. And he said, 'I'm going to take you. We're going to shoot an assault rifle in a firing range out in the country, and I'm going to teach you all about guns.' And it was a profoundly weird experience to have that much power in your hands, right? I've never been in a situation where if I had simply turned 45 degrees, I could have killed him. Never been in that sort of situation. I just thought it was a strange, really weird feeling. And so that was kind of unsettling.
Here I was with someone who knew a lot about guns, was an expert, and I realized how much knowledge you need to be a good user of a gun. Here's a guy who spent a lot of time and a lot of energy, thought through the way he handled the gun, the precautions he took, the way he described it.
That I'm fine with that. If people are going to be that —
thoughtful about it. Yeah. But people aren't going to be that people. That's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's this striking moment when you actually hit the — not you don't do it at first, but when you hit the cardboard center in the chest, did seeing that bullet hole change anything emotionally for you? Like, wow, that's to represent a man's chest and now you've hit the chest.
When I was shooting that gun, I was like, I am so far removed from the reality of gun violence. To me, I'm getting shaken by firing a gun at a cardboard cutout. There are people in this country who have firsthand experiences with someone firing a gun who are walking around packing right now.
Walk around packing. So, the gulf between the experience that most of us have with guns and the experience that a small number do is so — I was sort of struck by — there's a huge, huge gap between my experience and everyone else's.
Well, I want to bring in Dr. Pratt because you open the book introducing us to Dr. Abdullah Pratt, an ER doctor who joins us from his hometown, Chicago. I call him my hometown too. Dr. Pratt, welcome. Welcome. Welcome.
Thank you all for having me. It is truly the greatest of honors to be amongst you all, to hear from Malcolm again, and to hear your voice, Miss Winfrey, which is one I've heard every night going to sleep every time I was a child for your late running of your show every night with my family. So thank you all for having me. It's truly an honor.
Did you know — did Dr. — did you know I begin my book with you? With — I don't know if you knew that, but it all starts — the opening page starts with you, and we learn that you grew up on the South Side in an area plagued by gun violence, and that you chose to stay living and working there. So gun violence is deeply personal for you. Tell us why.
When you grow up and every child has their experience of why they want to be a physician, many times I think of the pain and suffering of friends, family members, and loved ones, and just wanting to fix it. You know, the day my brother died, I can remember sitting there and thinking, if I was here, what would I have done? And I'm not trained enough. I was just a student. I was a medical student.
Tell us how your brother died. Your brother died trying to keep some other kids from stealing a car. I read that.
That is the best theory that the detectives could come up with. But back in 2012, in that bloody summer of 2012, he was unfortunately murdered on his way home, and he was a defender of the neighborhood. And that same defense allowed me to become a physician and to focus on science. And that's one reason why I chose to become an emergency physician. Our last conversations were about, you know, the resiliency needed to actually pursue a career where you can both focus on helping save people individually, but also give back to the communities that bred us.
I think people may be listening to us may be shocked to hear this. I don't know how we can be shocked anymore, but you teach children as young as fourth grade how to treat gunshot wounds. Tell us how that came about and why that's necessary in your community.
