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Once, while having a steak dinner with Republicans in a small town in Indiana, the man sitting opposite me asked: “How do you cope in London, when Muslims elected that mayor and you have all that gun control?” I’d been in enough such situations to know that there was no “winning” a conversation that starts like this and so did my best to playfully bat the question away.
“Well, the Muslims didn’t elect a mayor – Londoners elected a Muslim mayor,” I said. “And we don’t talk much about gun control for the same reason we don’t talk about polar bear control: we don’t have many polar bears and we don’t have many guns.”
The quip didn’t land. The table looked at me somewhat bemused. The local party leader leaned over to help dig me out. “They don’t have freedom,” he explained. “They don’t understand freedom.”
In the two decades I spent reporting from America – 12 years as a correspondent for this paper – gun culture was one of two major issues that was difficult to translate (the other was health care). After every high-profile mass shooting, editors in London would ask whether this would finally prompt gun control, while in the US the sale of guns would go up as people “sought protection” from the next shooter.
Malcolm Gladwell’s The American Way of Killing will not help the translation much. Gladwell, who grew up in Canada, sets out to ask why: “a young boy like me can grow up [in one place] without any first-hand experience of lethal violence at all, [while] in another a young man can bury more than a dozen of his closest friends by his 30th birthday … What is so different about the United States?” It’s a big question. And if there’s one thing Gladwell loves, it is big questions.
He is the bestselling author of several popular books including The Tipping Point, which seeks to pinpoint the process by which individual choices turn into social epidemics; Blink, which investigates how we make informed decisions through our unconscious; and Outliers, which seeks to explain success and talent through graft. His method is to blend a breezy, readable writing style with a kind of Socratic, analytical approach that revels in its lack of ideological commitment; exquisite writing and pitch perfect story underpinned by moral ambivalence, which presents its findings as both mould-breaking and iconoclastic.
As social commentary his books are witty, vivid and accessible, providing the kind of nuggets that do well at dinner parties so long as nobody there is remotely impacted by the topic at hand. As meaningful guides to social policy and political intervention they are occasionally insightful but, for the most part, thin and, at their worst, counterproductive. Gladwell’s approach may appear to work when addressing a subject readers have never really thought about, but it breaks down with one – like guns in the US – that has been covered extensively.
Unlike in his previous books, he doesn’t aspire to construct a single argument and then write it through from beginning to end. Instead, he offers a series of discrete, and at times related, observations around America’s relationship to gun violence. His curiosity sprawls across disciplines and themes. He interviews doctors, sociologists, former police chiefs, criminologists, public health specialists, historians, psychologists, legal scholars, and surgeons, while his research takes in supreme court cases, slave history, 17th-century law, physiology, 18th-century grammar and firearms technology.
Evoking the parable of the blind men and the elephant he promises: “chapters on the trunk and the leg and the tusk, and at the end my hope is that by seeing all the parts in one place you will finally get a sense of the whole elephant – and understand that what seems from the outside like an intractable problem need not be intractable at all”.
Many of the chapters make useful corrections to the dominant narrative that are well known but bear repeating. He shows how the drop in gun deaths is due to improvements in surgery and other medical interventions rather than a drop in the number of shootings – showing how America can simultaneously be just as violent but less deadly. He explains how the “militia” mentioned in the second amendment were more about suppressing slave rebellions than defending themselves from state tyranny. He shows that most gun murders are the result of “expressive violence” – impulsive eruptions of anger – rather than “instrumental violence” – conscious, pre-meditated decisions to break the law.
Some are of marginal interest but little real consequence. Following a fairly involved introduction to gun technology he explains why the narrow focus on assault rifles is misguided. He devotes considerable space to litigating case law from 17th-century England which has come up in supreme court trials, as though settling it would in some way settle the legal case around gun control.
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A key theme running through the first part of the book is that America’s gun debate (if one can call it that) is undermined by a series of dishonest conversations that disable any substantive conversation. That is true. When Americans think of gun violence they imagine school massacres, gang members and cop shootings. The reality is you are more likely to be shot dead by someone you know than someone you don’t; most people who are killed by guns kill themselves; you are more likely to be shot dead if you have a gun in the house than if you don’t; mass shootings comprise a minority of gun murders; almost twice as many white people are killed by guns than black people; most Americans favour gun control and believe an increase in the number of guns will be bad for the country.
But much of the conversation that Gladwell initiates in the book is not honest either. By avoiding any serious analysis of systemic and structural inequalities – particularly in terms of race and class – he fails to engage with who gets murdered by guns and why. (He alludes to it, obliquely, in a section about how trauma centres are routinely located a significant distance from where black, brown and poor people tend to live, which costs lives.) He talks to doctors on the southside of Chicago, in Baltimore and sociologists in Alabama’s black belt – areas where many black and poor people are shot – without comment as to why that should be.
He advocates for more police, pointing out that the US has fewer police per capita than most European countries (which I certainly would never have guessed), without reflecting on who they tend to shoot and for what reasons. In a nation where non-racial democracy is a relatively new and fragile practice, that could lead to an escalation of violence rather than suppressing it. He derides the slogan to Defund the Police without acknowledging that a central plank of that demand was to shift resources from policing to mental health care, youth work and other social programmes that would address root causes. He deconstructs the confused syntax of the second amendment and concludes that the problem is not that a well-funded lobby, embedded in the far-right, wields disproportionate influence on America’s polity and judiciary, but that “it was written according to a set of rules and grammatical norms that no longer exist”.
As a result the reader is left with a sense that, when it comes to the US and guns, there are various things amiss, but with little idea of how substantial a difference they make to the problem, why they have not been addressed and who suffers as a result. Gladwell manages to skilfully depict the odd trunk, tusk and leg but somehow misses several elephants in the room.
