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The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic

by Malcolm Gladwell

Tracing the American gun-violence paradox

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AlbakiReads Editorial

Tracing the American gun-violence paradox

Malcolm Gladwell examines the United States’ unusually high homicide rate through a series of stories and research, asking how gun violence became such a persistent national problem. The book draws on interviews, archival material, and social science, moving among settings that include a North Carolina shooting range, Chicago’s South Side, and an Alabama plantation house. Its questions connect present-day violence and gun-control debates with historical influences and differences in policing. Together, these strands frame gun violence as a problem shaped by more than any single explanation, while considering why the country has struggled to understand it and address it.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in gun violence and American public policy.
  • Readers who prefer nonfiction that brings interviews, historical research, and social science together.
  • Readers interested in the intersections of policing, history, and gun control.

Themes

Gun violence in the United StatesGun-control debatesPolicingHistorical and social context

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Book overview

Malcolm Gladwell's most urgent book yet: a provocative investigation of America's epidemic of gun violence.

The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why?

In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American "peculiarity"--how the world's wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world's poorest countries.

Drawing on original interviews, archival and social science research, and his trademark insight, Gladwell approaches the American paradox through a series of stories. What can we learn from the miracle of a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C.? How have the legal troubles of a seventeenth-century English knight influenced American attempts at gun control? Why would a European police chief be baffled by the graduation ceremony at any American police academy?

In a sweeping narrative, Gladwell travels from a shooting range in North Carolina, to the South Side of Chicago, to an old plantation house in Alabama, painting a picture of a country that does not understand its most pressing social problem, and as result, does not understand how to fix it.
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