The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic
by Malcolm Gladwell
The US is richer, better educated and more religious than its peers, yet its homicide rate looks like the world's poorest countries. Gladwell's case is that Americans keep asking the wrong question about gun violence, and he works through it in stories, from a Chicago ER doctor who has buried fifteen friends to a seventeenth-century English knight.
Core ideas
- Much of what passes for gun control in America is theater: cosmetic bans on particular rifles leave untouched the easily acquired handgun, the weapon in most shootings, including most mass shootings.
- American gun violence is largely expressive rather than instrumental: people everywhere get enraged at neighbors and have bad days, but only in the US does that anger so readily end in a shooting, because a gun is always within reach.
- The epidemic persists because its costs land on so few: a small group of surgeons, victims and neighborhoods absorbs the consequences of everyone else's failure, and that moral hazard means nobody else is forced to act.
Published2026
Pages304
ISBN9780316603782
ReadOct 2026
