The Trace gets a lot of play with the media, treated like an unbiased reporting arm instead of the anti-gun media organ that it truly is. As a result, I find fault with a lot of what they put out. However, they do occasionally put out a nugget that doesn't completely suck.
It seems this is one of those strange times.
They posted an interview with economist Jens Ludwig about his latest work. I've seen it before and talked about it previously. Ludwig isn't pro-gun by any stretch of the imagination, as I noted in February.
But let's focus on some of what Ludwig said that wasn't completely stupid.
The questions asked by The Trace are in bold, with Ludwig's answers obviously not.
You suggest that gun violence happens because of heated arguments. You propose that the solution is improving the environments in which these conflicts occur. Can you break down what this idea entails and what more “eyes on the street” would look like in practice?
Sixty years ago, Jane Jacobs, the famous urban planner, wrote a wonderful book called “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” She argued that similarly poor neighborhoods vary enormously in the rate of crime and gun violence. She attributed that to the presence, or absence, in different neighborhoods, of people around who are willing to step in and de-escalate something before it turns violent.
There’s randomized experiments now that show that you can double the amount of crime prevention that you get from your spending on police and violence intervention by using data to put them in the times and places where conflict is most likely to occur.
We can’t have people on literally every street corner. We need to use the data to tell us when and where conflict is most likely, so we can prioritize those places for “eyes on the street.”
Throughout the book, you share an equation: gun violence = guns + violence. You state we can’t just focus on gun control but also need to address violence on its own. Why is it important to “diversify the portfolio” of how advocates tackle gun violence, beyond gun reform, beyond solutions that have been proposed in the past?
Given the importance of the problem, it seems like we would not want to put all of our eggs into the gun control basket. The problem is so important that we should be pushing on every margin possible.
If gun availability is something that we as a country can’t do very much about in the near term, the good news is that there’s another angle to this that we can work on in the meantime, that the data suggests can be enormously helpful, which is reducing the willingness of people to use guns to hurt one another.
Ludwig also talks about how the left tends to look at poverty as leading to crime, but in fact, crime also leads to poverty. That's probably a fair cop. No one wants to live in a high-crime area, so they move out. Those who remain or move in are those who have no choice in the matter.
Strangely, The Trace doesn't get into any significant discussion of the regulation of firearms, though it seems that he's not abandoned that terrible line of thinking.
However, this reminds me of a discussion Cam and I had with some others over dinner while at the NRA Annual Meeting. We talked about the claim the NRA made a few years ago, and one backed up by hard data, that when the NRA Annual Meeting comes to town, crime drops.
Now, the easy answer is that with so many armed Americans walking around, criminals decide to take the weekend off, which may play a factor.
Yet I argue that another factor is something Ludwig talks about above, and that's people being out and about. There are more potential witnesses, which means criminals aren't going to be as comfortable taking shots at folks because even if the people there aren't armed, they have eyes that work just fine, at least to some degree or another.
I do respect that Ludwig is talking about addressing violence in and of itself. That's a drum I've beaten for many years, though the fact that he still thinks gun control is part of the equation is where he loses me completely.
The Trace is still The Trace, which surprises no one, but there are interventions that aren't gun control that we might find some common ground on. It's rare, but they do occasionally touch on something that's not completely stupid.
If only this were the norm for everyone on that side of the debate instead. Then we could at least have honest discussions instead of...whatever the hell we get from them now.
