Book Talk | Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence with Jens Ludwig

On the 10th of April 2025, Penn Institute for Urban Research hosted a book talk and thought-provoking discussion with Jens Ludwig, Crime Lab Pritzker Director at the University of Chicago and author of Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Hosted in collaboration with Penn IUR Faculty Fellow John MacDonald of the Department of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania, the talk explored how behavioral science offers a new framework for addressing one of America’s most pressing crises.

Dr. Ludwig began by describing how gun violence is a uniquely American problem, especially among other countries in the global north, and how gun violence has been perceived over the 20th and 21st centuries by Americans–as a moral failing, as a result of drugs, social inequity, and so on. Here, Dr. Ludwig's intervention is this: rather than looking at the issue as one that is premeditated and calculated, gun violence in American cities largely tends to occur over smaller altercations. Thus, to understand how to prevent shooting deaths, it is important to understand the reasons behind these altercations.

"Our public policies and criminal justice systems have long viewed gun violence as a problem of rational thinking (system 2)” claimed Dr. Ludwig, "while it is more likely a problem of intuition and instinct (system 1)”. Drawing from behavioral economics, he introduced the concept of an ‘adaptive automatic response,' i.e., the instinctive response to fight back when challenged or confronted, which his team believes to be a prime reason. Here, his proposed solution to addressing gun violence was to gear criminal justice systems towards interrupting violence rather than performing arrests. Such a system, primarily aimed toward America's youth, would be instrumental in addressing the root causes and extent of gun violence.

About the book:

“Ludwig thinks more deeply about the causes of American gun violence than anyone, and his policy solutions have been proven to work. Unforgiving Places is the best book on American violence I’ve ever read.” 

– Steven Levitt, coauthor of Freakonomics

In 2007, economist Jens Ludwig moved to the South Side of Chicago to research two big questions: Why does gun violence happen, and is there anything we can do about it? Almost two decades later, the answers aren’t what he expected. Unforgiving Places is Ludwig’s revelatory portrait of gun violence in America’s most famously maligned city.

Disproving the popular narrative that shootings are the calculated acts of malicious or desperate people, Ludwig shows how most shootings actually grow out of a more fleeting source: interpersonal conflict, especially arguments. By examining why some arguments turn tragic while others don’t, Ludwig shows gun violence to be more circumstantial—and more solvable—than our traditional approaches lead us to believe.

Drawing on decades of research and Ludwig’s immersive fieldwork in Chicago, including “countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald’ses,” Unforgiving Places is a breakthrough work at the cutting edge of behavioral economics. As Ludwig shows, progress on gun violence doesn’t require America to solve every other social problem first; it only requires that we find ways to intervene in the places and the ten-minute windows where human behaviors predictably go haywire.

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker Director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, and co-director of the Education Lab.