How scientists radically reduced US gun violence (no gun ban)

0:00 America has a massive gun violence problem.

0:03 Compared to other wealthy countries,

0:04 the US murder rate is extremely high and behind

0:08 most of these deaths is the bullet trigger.

0:12 The obvious solution is then to ban [music] guns, but

0:15 We have the right to bear arms.

0:19 My name is Mel Bernstein and they call me the most armed man in America.

0:23 I have over 4,000 weapons in my name,

0:26 over 200 machine guns, flamethrowers and everything I have is legal.

0:31 Yeah, this is unlikely to happen.

0:33 Luckily, I have some good news.

0:35 Social scientists have recently conducted

0:38 extensive experiments that confirm that US

0:40 gun violence can actually be drastically reduced without banning guns.

0:46 Take this remarkable study from the University of Pennsylvania.

0:50 They tried something almost absurdly simple.

0:53 Working with the city of Philadelphia,

0:55 they mapped tens of thousands of vacant lots scattered across its neighborhoods.

1:00 Then they randomly selected around 550 lots and cleaned them up,

1:04 trimming the grass, removing the trash

1:06 and clearing the broken bottles and [music] needles.

1:09 These spaces went from abandoned wastelands to [music]

1:13 usable open community space.

1:16 This simple change turned out to be a game-changer.

1:19 After just 1 year, the neighborhood

1:21 with restored lots experienced powerful shifts.

1:25 People reported feeling safer,

1:27 crime dropped [music] and even gun violence fell by nearly 30%.

1:32 30% no extra policing, no gun [music] confiscations,

1:36 no lifting entire communities out of poverty,

1:38 just a small change in the physical environment.

1:40 [music] But why would a clean a lot

1:44 lower the chance of someone pulling a trigger?

1:46 [music] To answer that question, we spoke with Chicago Professor Jens Ludwig,

1:51 one of the leading researchers on gun [music] violence.

1:54 In his book Unforgiving Places, he argues that most people fundamentally

1:58 misunderstand the nature of violent behavior.

2:01 For decades, we've treated violence as a rational cost-benefit decision,

2:06 but a deeper analysis of the motives for homicides reveal that only

2:10 20% of homicides are people being killed for a specific goal,

2:14 things like shooting someone for revenge or trying to take their wallet.

2:17 In contrast, almost 80% of homicides in Chicago

2:21 arise not from such moments of calculated criminal intent,

2:24 but rather from fights or arguments that escalated beyond control.

2:29 In other words, most shootings by far happen in short bursts of emotion,

2:35 tiny windows of impulsive reactive decision-making.

2:38 Gun violence comes from these 10-minute windows.

2:40 We've historically spent enormous sums of money trying to change

2:45 the incentives people [music] face in those 10-minute windows.

2:49 That has not worked.

2:50 The murder rate in the United States today is

2:52 almost exactly the same as it was in 1900.

2:54 But as we've seen, it does not have to be that way.

2:58 As it turns out, the impulsive nature of this 10-minute

3:00 window of decision-making is actually the key to reducing violence,

3:05 that is without banning guns.

3:07 But to see exactly how this works,

3:10 we first need to get the obvious out of the way.

3:13 Wouldn't it just be much easier to ban guns?

3:17 Well, according to the Small Arms Survey,

3:19 the United States is the only country on Earth with more guns than people,

3:23 with an estimated 120 firearms for every 100 residents.

3:27 To grasp the magnitude of that figure,

3:29 consider that the next country in the list

3:31 has 53 firearms per 100 people and that's Yemen,

3:35 a country that has literally been in a civil war for years.

3:38 At the other end of the spectrum,

3:39 countries like South Korea and Japan have gun ownership rates close to zero

3:44 and they also have some of the lowest homicide rates in the world.

3:48 Research on this is very clear.

3:50 No, this is not a massive coincidence.

3:53 The research that I've done and what other people have done

3:55 show that um when a place has more guns on net, the murder rate goes up.

4:02 So, whatever deterrent effect more gun ownership might have to prevent crime

4:08 is outweighed by the effect of guns

4:11 increasing the lethality of interpersonal conflict.

4:14 So, at first glance, it seems pretty straightforward.

4:18 Fewer guns is fewer murders.

4:20 This would also fit with our knowledge that almost

4:22 80% of murders are the consequence of emotional outbursts.

4:26 If you give arguing emotional people guns,

4:29 then of course some of these guns will be used.

4:32 Changing what could have been a black eye into a gun [music] wound.

4:35 However, firearms alone do not tell the full story.

4:39 Switzerland, for example,

4:40 has a higher rate of gun ownership than [music] Mexico,

4:43 yet far lower homicide rates.

4:45 So, something else must also be at play.

4:48 The way to think about this is like gun violence is equal to guns plus violence.

4:53 So, gun availability matters,

4:56 but so does the willingness of people to use guns to hurt one another.

4:59 This is the key to understanding how scientists [music]

5:02 drastically reduced gun violence without banning guns.

5:05 Rather than focusing on taking away guns,

5:07 which seems [music] politically impossible in the US,

5:09 they focused on reducing the chances [music]

5:12 a fight or argument would lead to an emotionally charged violent outburst.

5:16 That's ultimately like um optimistic insight into the problem

5:21 because what it suggests then is if the guns if the 400 million guns

5:25 in the United States are not going anywhere anytime soon,

5:28 there's something else that we can worry

5:30 about with public policy in the meantime,

5:32 which is how do we change the willingness

5:33 of people to hurt one another with guns.

5:35 But before we dive into the violence-reducing experiments that actually work,

5:39 let's talk about some of the groundbreaking [music] tools that scientists

5:42 are increasingly using to develop their own apps and websites.

5:46 Thanks to our sponsor, Lovable.

5:48 For example, [music] my colleague Alejandro recently started experimenting

5:52 with Lovable to build an app for this video.

5:55 Now, he has no background in coding and yet

5:57 he was able to build this super fancy data

5:59 [music] dashboard for this video in seconds and he

6:02 showed me that this was actually super easy to make.

6:05 To create this fancy dashboard, he just [music] talked to the AI by saying,

6:10 "I want a simple policy data dashboard where users can compare violence

6:14 [music] statistics across countries." And after 1 or 2 minutes of waiting,

6:18 he got this cool software [music] that he

6:19 can refine visually directly on the screen,

6:23 adjusting colors, components, spacing, layout without touching any code.

6:27 Then I asked him if he could also make this into an interactive [music] map.

6:31 And honestly, my mind was blown thinking about the possibilities.

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7:28 With that said, let's get back to what

7:30 actually reduces gun violence without banning guns.

7:33 [music] Let's start with the policies that have actually not worked and why.

7:38 Most Americans think that violent behavior is

7:43 due to one of two different explanations.

7:46 So, one sort of view is that violence is due to morally

7:50 bad people who are just not afraid of the criminal justice system.

7:53 And so that leads you to conclude, as you point out,

7:55 that the only way to prevent gun violence

7:58 is to threaten people with bigger criminal justice sticks.

8:01 Most Americans who don't believe in that conventional wisdom

8:05 believe in a different conventional wisdom, which is that

8:09 [music] violence is due to economic desperation.

8:10 It's just people who will do whatever

8:12 it takes to feed themselves and their families.

8:14 And so the only thing that you can do to prevent

8:18 gun violence is to make the alternatives to crime more lucrative.

8:22 Um so people make a different choice.

8:25 That's more that's better job prospects,

8:27 more generous social policies and things like that.

8:30 So, according to conventional wisdom, to reduce violence,

8:33 you either need the carrot, subsidized jobs,

8:36 food stamps, cash transfers, housing vouchers or the stick,

8:40 [music] harsher penalties, more arrests, bigger prisons.

8:44 However, as we've seen, most violence by far is not rational.

8:49 Both the carrot and the stick approach target rational violence,

8:53 people choosing to violently rob someone for money because they're poor,

8:57 evil people choosing to murder someone.

8:59 But crucially, they do not address violence emerging

9:02 from emotionally charged arguments gone wrong type of situations.

9:06 With this knowledge in mind, it's not surprising that policies aiming to reduce

9:10 poverty do not substantially reduce violent behavior.

9:14 For example, a large experiment in Texas and Georgia randomly gave

9:18 one group of people leaving prison a substantial income while withholding

9:21 it from another and roughly the same number of individuals

9:24 in both groups ended [music] up back in jail the following year.

9:28 Similarly, study after with [music]

9:32 food stamps, subsidized jobs or housing vouchers has found a consistent pattern.

9:39 [music] These programs do reduce poverty, which is great,

9:41 and they do reduce property crime, which is also great, robbing.

9:45 But they tend to have very little effect on violence.

9:48 So, the carrot doesn't really work.

9:51 But what about [music] the stick?

9:52 Well, given that we have seen most violence are arguments gone wrong,

9:56 you'd expect that the stick would not work either.

9:59 But actually, there is some evidence that increasing

10:02 the incarceration rate does reduce violent crime.

10:06 But how can this be?

10:07 Given that most violence is the consequence of emotional outbursts?

10:11 Well, locking up people does work to an extent

10:15 simply because it removes both some evil people

10:18 with very violent intentions and some of them people

10:21 that are most prone to emotional outbursts from society.

10:25 However, the more people you lock up, the higher the costs are to society,

10:29 both because you have to pay for prisons and because

10:32 you have fewer [music] potential workers in the economy.

10:35 On top of that, in the US context,

10:37 it's it's not clear how much further we have room to go, right?

10:43 We have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.

10:47 Um and at the same time, as we just said,

10:51 the highest murder rate of any rich country in the world.

10:54 So yes, the stick [music]

10:55 can sometimes reduce violence, but it does so at a very high social cost.

11:00 Meanwhile, the carrot is effective for reducing

11:03 poverty and lowering property crime like burglaries,

11:07 but they have a very limited impact on gun violence.

11:10 And the reason these approaches have fallen short is simply that both

11:14 poverty and evil intent would lead to robberies or revenge types of violence.

11:19 But as we've seen, that's not what is the leading cause of violence in the US.

11:24 For more evidence, just look at this comparison of Chicago neighborhoods.

11:28 It's true that shootings are extremely rare in wealthy areas,

11:32 but among equally poor neighborhoods, the level of violence varies dramatically.

11:37 Some neighborhoods are extremely violent, while others are far less so.

11:41 If poverty or bad morals were the whole story,

11:44 we would not see such a huge difference among similar neighborhoods.

11:48 Something else is clearly going on.

11:50 According to Professor Jens Ludwig,

11:52 the solution has to do with behavioral economics,

11:57 the branch of economics that focuses on human irrationality.

12:01 If you think the solution is either bigger sticks or bigger carrots,

12:05 you implicitly think the problem of gun

12:07 violence or violent behavior is one of incentives.

12:10 You imagine that before anybody ever pulls a trigger,

12:14 they are more or less rationally or deliberately or carefully

12:18 thinking through the pros and cons of what's about to happen.

12:21 But that's not what most murders,

12:23 most shootings in the United States actually are.

12:26 The overwhelming share of murders stem from arguments.

12:31 So not surprisingly,

12:32 the truly successful studies about reducing violence have actually been

12:36 about how to prevent an argument from escalating into violence.

12:40 [music] In a nutshell, social scientists found two ways to do this.

12:45 [music] The first is about what criminologists call informal social control.

12:49 [music] The basic idea is simple.

12:51 When conflicts begin to emerge, having responsible adults,

12:55 this can be neighbors or community members or security guards nearby,

12:59 can diffuse the situation before it escalates into violence.

13:03 In vibrant neighborhoods, there are plenty of eyes on the street.

13:06 People know one another.

13:08 They look out for each other and they

13:09 feel empowered to step in when tensions rise.

13:13 So the first behavioral approach would

13:15 be increasing the likelihood of external interruption.

13:19 [music] That is, making it more likely

13:21 that someone steps in before violence escalates.

13:25 This is exactly what the Pennsylvania experiment we

13:27 discussed in the introduction of this video achieved.

13:32 [music] It's not that a nice neighborhood deters criminals in itself,

13:35 but rather that when you fix up a vacant lot,

13:38 you turn it into a little pocket park,

13:40 people are much more likely to now spend time

13:42 out in public rather than hunker down in their homes,

13:45 and shootings go down and not by a little but by a lot,

13:49 on the order of like 20 or 30% in low-income neighborhoods.

13:52 Other studies examining the impact of improving street lighting

13:56 or hiring additional security guards have reached similar conclusions.

14:00 More eyes on the street lead to less violence.

14:02 When someone intervenes early, whether it's a neighbor,

14:05 a passerby or a security guard, violence is not simply postponed, [music]

14:10 it's prevented because the moment of escalation has passed and therefore a snap

14:15 decision of violence that would turn a life around is never made.

14:18 [music] The second behavioral solution

14:21 that actually works focuses on self-interruptions,

14:25 helping individuals manage those tense,

14:26 emotionally charged, 10-minute windows themselves.

14:30 This approach closely mirrors what

14:32 psychologists describe as cognitive behavioral techniques.

14:36 And one of the most successful interventions of this kind is

14:40 the Becoming a Man or BAM program developed by Youth Guidance.

14:46 BAM works with a young man in urban schools who face

14:48 a heightened risk of dropping out or becoming involved in the justice system.

14:53 Through structured in-school group counseling sessions,

14:56 the program teaches social cognitive skills

14:59 designed to help participants slow down, evaluate situations more clearly,

15:03 and make wiser decisions in moments

15:06 when their impulses might otherwise take over.

15:09 Just listen to this participant of the program.

15:12 I was always having anger issues.

15:14 As I kept going to BAM, the change I noticed in myself was more self-control.

15:20 I was walking in the hallway one time and someone

15:24 bumped into I started to feel myself getting real angry, like I wanted to react.

15:29 [music] I wanted to tell him about himself, smack him.

15:33 Then I just thought about it.

15:36 [music] He probably didn't mean to do it on purpose.

15:37 It was an accident.

15:39 So I took a deep breath, calmed down, and just walked to class.

15:44 Jens Ludwig himself was in charge of evaluating the BAM program

15:48 through several large-scale randomized controlled trials

15:52 implemented in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago, [music]

15:55 and the results were staggering.

15:56 The program improved school engagement, increased graduation rates by 12 to 19%,

16:02 and led to a staggering 45 to 50% decrease in violent arrests.

16:07 Even more impressively, when a version of the program was implemented with even

16:11 higher-risk teenagers who were inside a juvenile temporary detention center,

16:16 the results remained significant.

16:18 [music] We saw that there's a statistically

16:20 there's like a 20% reduction in recidivism

16:24 for the [music] people at highest estimated risk for for violence in Chicago.

16:29 And yes, a 20 to 50% reduction in violent crime is enormous.

16:34 And unlike the massive costs of the US prison system,

16:37 these interventions are basically free.

16:40 You've got the kids, you've got the building, you've got the guards.

16:43 The marginal cost the the extra cost is basically just like

16:47 a week of training for the guards and photocopying the booklets.

16:50 It's as close to free as anything ever gets.

16:52 Which brings us to our conclusion,

16:54 which is that with the exception of making the case for taking guns away,

16:59 most of the popular debate around violence in the US is misinformed.

17:04 Most violence by far are arguments gone wrong.

17:06 It's about emotional, not irrational decision-making.

17:10 Therefore, both the stick and the carrot largely fail.

17:13 On the other hand, programs like Becoming a Man

17:15 or environmental changes such as cleaning up neighborhoods are cheap,

17:19 easy ways to drastically reduce gun

17:21 violence because they either increase informal

17:24 control or because they teach people

17:27 to better control their emotions themselves.

17:30 But of course, this is not an excuse to not

17:34 reduce poverty or a deflection from the fact that [music] yes,

17:38 giving lots of emotional people guns leads to more gun deaths.

17:42 No, it's just an interesting [music] insight from behavioral

17:44 science that can help make the world a better place,

17:48 which is hopefully why you watch this channel in the first place.

17:52 [music] Let me know in the comments if this insight

17:54 surprised you just as much [music] as it did me.

17:57 Don't forget to check out our sponsor, Lovable,

17:59 by clicking the link in the description of the video.

18:02 This really helps out the channel.