Malcolm Gladwell: "The American Way of Killing"

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1:18The tipping point, blink, outliers, what the dogs saw, David and Goliath talking to strangers, the bomber mafia, revenge of the tipping point, and now the American way of killing all the work of Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having. Okay, let's parse the language. A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep in bear arms shall not be infringed. How do you square the initial being clause with what we'll call the operative clause? Yeah, so this is at the heart of the debate over the secular amendment in this country is really a question of grammar because that sentence that you just quoted to me is a sentence written in the 1780s. According to grammatical norms that are no longer operative in the 21st century. We don't talk like that anymore.

2:20We don't write that like that anymore. When was the last time you used what's called an initial being clause in the way you write or speak? We don't do that. They did that in the 1780s. They did that in Shakespeare's time. Don't do that now. So we're faced with a problem with the second amendment to try it. We're trying to make sense of a sentence written in an era where norms around language and the meaning of words were completely different. And the court, the the the current Supreme Court chose to turn its back on everything, you know, linguists who study history know about the grammar of the 18th century and to come up with its own completely idiosyncratic and erroneous interpretation of what that sentence means. The court said there's no connection between that first clause about militias and that second clause but the right to bear arms, right? And in fact that's exactly the opposite of the way Madison intended it. If you look at the way Madison used

3:21initial being clauses, he meant them to condition the main clause of the set. Okay. I thought something really compelling in the book is that there's a linguist that you introduced to us who looked at all of James Madison's writings and found what like a thousand instances of his use of a being what did she see? What she saw was when Madison used a being clause, a clause where they were being in it, what he used that in one in a very specific way and that was to condition the main clause of the sentence. In other words, because it's the imagine that sentence we written as because because a well-regulated militias necessary for the defensive of free state, the right of people to bear arms should not be infringed. He's talking about the right to bear arms in the context of militias. That's how he used that particular grammatical construction. And then the second question, even bigger and more important question is, okay, so what's he talking about when he's talking about

4:22militias, right? And the answer is he's talking about slave patrols. Right, because you maintain and you defend the position that the actual origin of the Second Amendment was in defense of slave owners relative to their slaves. Listen, you made reference to this a moment ago, Justice Scalia, because he wrote the Heller decision, he disagreed with you. Why was he wrong? Because Scalia completely disregarded the considered and educated opinions of the linguists who have looked at that sentence. They all file a make a speech before the court. In fact, if you look in that this is all contained in the Heller decision, one of the landmark decisions of the last 50 years. Every major historical linguist in the country wrote a brief to the court saying, okay, this is how this is what that particular grammatical construction meant in the 18th century. And Scalia just turned his back on it and played amateur linguist and saddled us with an interpretation that

5:28is set back, you know, regulation of guns in this country by a generation. So in the new book, the American way of killing, you say that we misunderstand our history with guns and you just gave us the Cliff's Note version, you also say we misunderstand lethal violence. How so? Yeah. Well, there's a really interesting distinction that criminologists use when it comes to lethal violence. And it is between what they call instrumental violence and what they call expressive violence. Instrumental violence is violence that is that is a planned rational act that is in the pursuit of some goal. You I want to rob you and in the course of robbing you, I kill you, right? What I'm really trying to do is to get you a wallet, you struggle whatever. So I or I'm defending my drug turf and you you're encroaching on it. I kill you in order to defend my economic interest. That's instrumental violence. If you if you watch law and order, it's all instrumental violence.

6:30People planning I actually watched two two seasons of law and order to kind of verify this. Expressive violence is you and I have a beef. You know, you killed my brother. I'm I'm angry at you. I retaliate and then your cousin retaliates. That's expressive violence. It's emotional. It's spontaneous. It's in the moment. It's unplanned and the violence is the point we're using. And the question is what kind of violence do we see in America, lethal violence? It's we see expressive violence. It's young men settling disputes. That's what we're seeing. And when you understand that, it dramatically changes how you choose to what the right strategy is to intervene and stop that violence. Right. In other words, as I was reading the book, I said to myself, we don't have a monopoly on hotheadedness in the United States. What separates us according to Malcolm Gladwell is there, wherever there might be. They just can't reach for a gun the way that we can in the United States.

7:32Yeah. The simplest explanation for why the United States has homicide rates that are five times higher than Europe. Is it young men in Europe, settle their arguments with fists and young men in America, settle their arguments with guns? Take me inside. I don't know the pronunciation. Teggle, Tego, that prison in Berlin, Berlin, a place where by the way, they've got far more cops than say LA, policing and prisons, a totally different approach. Yeah. So this is it's about how you choose to spend your public safety dollar. So European countries and the United States spend the same share of GDP on public safety. Same amount of money, right. We're not. They choose to spend the bulk of that money on police. That's why a typical European city will have twice as many police per capita as a typical American city at a very small amount on prisons. So they send far fewer people to prison. When you're in prison, you have sort of typically far shorter terms. And prison itself

8:34is not the does not resemble in any way American prisons. Their maximum security prisons look like our minimum security prisons basically. We do the opposite. We spend an enormous amount of money on prisons. And relatively speaking of very small amount on the police, I would argue and and almost anyone in European law enforcement would agree that we do it wrong and they do it right. It makes no sense to spend all your money on prisons and skimp on the police. It's crazy. I just don't know if you can sell it politically in the United States. It's going to be a willy-horton commercial on steroids. My opponent so and so once them to go to a country club, I can see it now. Quick reaction from you? Sure, but the question is how seriously do we want to take combating lethal violence in this country? There's going to be along the way if we're going to come up with better strategies. We have to seriously reexamine some of our assumptions. And that would be one of them. You know, you got to put your put your resources in the police, not prisons.

9:35There's no way around that particular conclusion. We see a dip in the homicide rate and we celebrate what is the Cornell effect as you define it? Yeah, I call it. Yeah, there's a famous gunshots trauma surgeon called Eddie Cornwell who I like in the book I talk about what I call the Cornwell effect. And that is that lethal violence, the homicide rates, a function of two things, the underlying level of violence and the victim's proximity to a trauma center or how good the health care they're getting. If you shoot, I live in a side in New York and Hudson Valley. If you shoot me, it's going to take an ambulance half an hour to get there and it's going to take me the ambulance an hour to get to a trauma center. Even a relatively modest wound is, I'm going to die of that because I'm not going to get to the hospital in time. The same wound on the upper east side of Manhattan where I'm two minutes from a trauma center, I'm going to live, I'm going to have a hundred percent survival rate. In one case, it's a homicide. In one case,

10:36it's aggravated as a assault, right? But it's the same crime. It's just that in one case, the victim gets access to quality health care. We forget about that second piece. And that explains a lot of what the decline in homicide has happened over the last 50 years or so. But Malcolm, Malcolm, I, in the book, I learned from you that the odds of a white guy getting shot and surviving or higher than a black guy getting shot and surviving. And it seems counterintuitive because of an urban concentration of more minorities. You would think, ah, therefore, the black guy's going to live and Malcolm, Gladwell, out in the Hudson Valley, he's going to be one who dies. You know, that was a study done in Chicago. And in Chicago, Chicago's a good example of this, the only in the last couple of years was the retramis center on the south side of Chicago. So if you got shot in, you know, on the south side, you had to go all the way to the north side of Chicago to get treated. That's 40, whatever,

11:3945 minutes in an ambulance at best. And, you know, the, the, the simple rule of responding to gunshot wounds is every minute counts as a golden hour. You got to get you on the, on the operating table within an hour or your chances of living, uh, decreased dramatically. And the simple truth is that disadvantaged communities tend to be further from trauma centers than advantaged communities in this country. I learned from the American way of killing that we track homicides, obviously, in the United States. Do we really not track gunshots? This is an incredible fact. Only in the most hop hazard way. So there's a, I did an interview with a really wonderful criminologist named Natalie Hippel, who is part of this project, where in a couple of cities, they got a grant from the Department of Justice to count gunshots. And they literally count them by hand. They get an email in the morning from the local police precincts and the hospitals telling them what kind of gunshot wounds they saw the night before. There's no official tracking of that statistic. And you would think in a country that is in the middle of a public health

12:42crisis around lethal violence that we would want to have an accurate indication of how many people are being shot. We don't. We're not giving it all away for free. I want people to read the new book, but the bottom line is this, it seems we don't have a crime problem. We've got a violence problem, more specifically defined coupled with access to guns, fair summation. That's a fair summation. Okay. And Malcolm Gladwell, somebody listening, somebody watching this, they might say, oh, Malcolm Gladwell, what does he want us to do? Return to Dodge City in the Wild West. And you would say what? I would say actually, you know, Dodge City was only dangerous for a year to have. And then they heard lots of police at Institute of really strict gun control. And their murder rate goes to almost zero. So yeah, let's go back to Dodge City. I feel like it'll be really good at it. I mean, who knew you like had to check your gun when you came into town? Yeah. Dodge City's only dangerous. Like they had this brief experience of, you know, it's a frontier town with lots of bars and young men coming and getting drunk and shooting

13:43each other. So the town fathers say enough. And they hire a very large police department. And they you have to they have a they have a gun check at the bridge or bridge in the town where you you got to you get a little thing like a code check and you check your gun and then you pick it up when you leave. Not sure. Not there. But it comes way down. Thank you for being so gracious with your time. I love the gift that you have of lending fresh eyes to an old problem. And you did it again in this book. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you so much. The book is called the American Way of Killing the invention of an epidemic. This is Book Club with Michael Smerchanish from Sirius XM. You know that feeling. Too many updates. Too many meetings. Too many things falling through the cracks. Monday.com was built for that gap. The AI work platform designed from the ground up for people and agents to work side-by-side and deliver more together. Drafting the brief, flagging risks, running a competitive scan. Your agent

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15:44your first month and learn how therapy can help you manage stress at betterhelp.com. Cost and coverage may vary. Discount cannot be combined with insurance. Michael Spurkana's program. Listen weekdays at 9 AM East on POTUS. Sirius XM, channel 124, and anytime on the Sirius XM app. Welcome Gladwell. You just heard him say we've got a violence problem in this country. Malcolm Gladwell's brand new book, The American Way of Killing. He says we have a violence problem. Here's what separates us from other nations. When we have violence, there's a weapon handy. I put a story in the newsletter today from ABC. I did this deliberately because of Malcolm Gladwell being on today's program on any other day. And I don't mean to be callous. This would not have risen to the level of making the newsletter. It's from ABC headline 12 year old girl fatally shot in park where youth football game was being played. Date line is

16:45Baltimore. A 12 year old girl was killed when she was caught in the crossfire of gunshots between two men who were apparently arguing over a parking space. Further along in the story, the two men involved in the argument believed to be over a parking space began shooting at each other. So both of them had guns. The girl and a woman were struck by bullets. The 12 year old girl is dead. I've said before we don't have a monopoly in the United States on mental health issues. And we don't have a monopoly on violence. It's that what happens is our arguments, they go sideways and there's a gun handy. Here's another one. Also, this is from my print edition of the New York Times today. I could sit here and do this every single day with multiple accounts. Two dead and dozens injured in shooting at block party. Two men were killed and 35 people were

17:47wounded in a shooting at a block party early on Sunday in Georgia. Brett Walls, the coroner in Dually County, Georgia said two men ages 20 and 23 had been pronounced dead at the scene in Vienna, Georgia at about one 15 a.m. Georgia Bureau of investigation said that 35 people were wounded. Victims taken to a local hospital, motive for the shooting, not immediately known. In a statement on Facebook, the high school said that the block party was a not-school sponsored event that the impact of the shooting may reach men. You know, big party, somebody fighting somebody else. If it happened in France, if it happened in England, if it happened in Norway, it wouldn't have ended in gun violence. That is Malcolm Gladwell's point. It's one of the points that he makes in this book. I must say it, it just changed the way that I'm I'm thinking about crime. He says we misunderstand our history with guns. In the book, discusses how a linguist from Australia

18:53looked at James Madison and his use of a being clause. You heard that at the very beginning of the discussion. And there were, I said, a thousand to Malcolm Gladwell. There were 900 and how is it? 96 other instances where Madison similarly, you know, spoken like a Shakespearean way with a being clause. Okay. In how many of those instances, did he use the being clause separate from the operative clause? Answer, never. Conclusion, the militia conversation in the second amendment is the basis for what follows, not to be separated the way that Justice Scalia did in the DC versus Heller case. Hang on, I'm thumbing through my copy of the book. I wanted to read something to you.

19:57Yeah. Second amendment was written by James Madison, maybe the most intellectually distinguished of the founding fathers. The use of words is to express ideas he once wrote, et cetera, et cetera, in his work on the single most important intellectual and civic project of his lifetime then it is inconceivable that Madison just dashed off a quick thought and left it at that. Madison never dashed anything off. The reason the second amendment is problematic is simply because it was written according to a set of rules and grammatical norms that no longer exist. To understand what he really meant, we have to think as he a man of the late 18th century did. We need to enter the mind of James Madison. Again, what we're studying now is this word choice, a well-regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma. The right of the people to keep in bear arms shall not be infringed.

21:04So back now to Malcolm Gladwell. There are two ways to do this. The first is through the use of what is called linguistic corpora. These are massive research databases that contain hundreds of thousands of digitized documents going back in some cases many hundreds of years. Think of them as Google, but for a dusty old manuscript buried deep in library archives. For example, there is something called the Corpus of Founding Era American English maintained by Brigham Young University, which holds more than 120,000 separate documents from the period of 1765 through 1799 totaling over 130 million words. If you want to know how many times George Washington dangled a participle, the cofeea can tell you. So what do linguistic corpora tell us about how James Madison used being clauses, a well-regulated militia being necessary? The most extensive empirical

22:10analysis of Madison's prose has been done by an Australian linguist named Carrie Sullivan. Sullivan picked four corpora that were most relevant to the period before and after the writing of the Constitution. A span covering 650 years she made a database yada yada yada. Her first conclusion confirms why Madison's sentence is so mysterious to us today. In the past 100 years she found it has become extremely rare to find a sentence in published English where an initial being clause and the main clause that follows have different subjects. Further along, Sullivan turns to the most crucial question. Word justices Roberts, Kennedy, and Scalia correct in their reading of the Second Amendment that the initial being clause does not modify the operative clause that they are separate thoughts. Remember what Kennedy said. It seems to me there is an interpretation

23:11of the Second Amendment that conforms the two clauses and in effect delinks them. To answer the question Sullivan, the linguist, went through all 976 of Madison's initial being clauses to see how many times Madison used a being clause in this particular way as a thought separate from the operative clause next to it. Her answer never, never. Welcome, Gladwell. It's really great. So he says we're having a dishonest conversation about the Second Amendment. We misunderstand our history with guns. We misunderstand lethal violence. We have a violence problem in association with weapons like the 12 year old dead in Baltimore, like the two dead who are dead in Georgia this weekend from the block party. We think he argues that we are overpoliced when in fact we're underpoliced and we misunderstand crime statistics were really good

24:16at tracking the homicide rate. Like hey, the homicide rate is down. When maybe the reason the homicide rate is down is we've gotten really good at saving lives. More people are getting shot or a constant number of people are getting shot. But they're being saved. He calls it the Cornell factor because of this particular trauma surgeon who's really good at saving lives. I open her and that is today's poll question at smurconish.com. I am asking now you know as Paul Harvey would say the rest of the story. I am asking you whether we are under or overpoliced. He thinks that we are significantly underpoliced and they were spending much too much time and money on prison and that Berlin maybe has a better way of looking at it because and people are incarcerated. I mean, I it's like I said to him though. Can you really sell this? Who's going to be the candidate who's going to go out and say we need to diminish prison sentences

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