Malcolm Gladwell stopped by the Today show to discuss his latest book.
The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic, published Tuesday by Little, Brown, explores why the U.S. has been beset by gun violence. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a lucid argument for rethinking our approach to firearms.”
Asked why he decided to write a book on gun violence, Gladwell said, “I’ve been interested in this topic my whole writing career. Almost every book I’ve written has had at least one chapter [about it]....I grew up in rural Ontario, Canada, and America was a hundred miles away, less than that. And I knew that America looked like Canada, ate the same food, lived in the same houses, worshiped the same God…but for some reason, when you crossed the border, the levels of criminal violence were four, five times higher. I didn’t understand why.”
Gladwell said there is a distinction between crime and violence.
“Crime—the likelihood that I’m going to get my car broken into, or my house broken into, or my pocket picked—is not higher in the United States than in any other major Western European country or Canada,” he said. “What’s different about this country is violence. Our levels of criminal violence are off the charts.…Crime’s not our issue. Our issue is people shooting each other.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
