PREFACE

Dorchester Avenue runs right through the heart of Chicago’s South Side. At its northern end is Kenwood, an upscale neighborhood that’s been home to some of the city’s most influential Black residents, including Senator Carol Moseley Braun, Muddy Waters, Louis Farrakhan, and Muhammad Ali. At 47th Street is the Original Pancake House, for my money the best breakfast spot in Chicago. Across the street is the Dunkin’ Donuts that is my older daughter’s favorite because there’s never a line on the customer side of the bulletproof glass.

Just south of Kenwood is Hyde Park, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in a city that is still overwhelmingly segregated. Hyde Park is where I live with my family, and it’s also home to the University of Chicago, where I work. 

At 58th Street is the Cloisters, a high-rise apartment building that claims to have housed more Nobel Laureates than any other apartment building in the world.

At 59th Street, Dorchester crosses the Midway, a mile-long, one-block-wide strip of manicured green space designed by the same landscape architect behind New York’s Central Park. The Midway separates Hyde Park from Woodlawn, the predominantly Black neighborhood to the south. For much of the twentieth century, Woodlawn was a thriving middle-class area, home to a stretch of clubs along 63rd Street where some of the world’s most famous musicians played. Many of those buildings are demolished now, leaving stretches of 63rd vacant and Woodlawn residents divided over concerns about redevelopment and gentrification.

South of Woodlawn, some 10 miles before Dorchester Avenue ends by the abandoned steel mills along Lake Calumet, is a sign for a small mulching business, E-Z Tree Recycling (slogan: “A tree is a terrible thing to waste”). This sign at Dorchester and 71st Street is the unofficial but highly consequential border designation between two Chicago neighborhoods: South Shore to the east, stretching all the way to Lake Michigan, and Greater Grand Crossing running to the west, along a portion of 71st that was renamed for local resident Emmet Till.

At first glance, Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore appear quite similar. They’re next-door communities in the same American city, mostly indistinguishable in their economic conditions and in the racial and ethnic makeup of the people who live there.

But the two neighborhoods are dramatically different in one important respect: On a per-capita basis, there are about twice as many shootings in Greater Grand Crossing as in South Shore.

Whatever you believe about the causes of gun violence in America, those beliefs almost surely fail to explain why Greater Grand Crossing would be so much more of a violent place than South Shore. How, in a city and a country where guns are everywhere, does gun violence occur so unevenly—even across such short distances, in this case literally right across the street? If we can’t explain even the most basic questions of where and why gun violence occurs, no wonder the US has made so little progress solving this long-term public policy and public health crisis.

I’ve worked for thirty years to try to understand the puzzle of gun violence in America. I come to the problem as someone who is technically not from here: I was born in Germany and immigrated to the US with my family when I was three. My father’s first job was as a dishwasher, which he took over from his father. I grew up hearing stories from my parents about living on potatoes and dandelion soup after the war. My mom learned English from watching Sesame Street with my sister and me. Her English eventually got good enough for a subscription to Time magazine, which I’d then pore over when she was done. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s as violent-crime rates surged, I could see the coverage in Time becoming more anxious. President Ronald Reagan blamed violence on what he called the age of “the human predator.”1 By the 1990s, in the rhetorical arms race of the time, this label evolved into “super-predators.”2

As a first-generation college-goer I stumbled into economics because that’s what my freshman roommate happened to study. But I was never really that interested in the stock market or GDP; I wanted to use what economists know about data to answer questions about what I thought of as the real world. I went to college in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the late 1980s, as the crack-cocaine epidemic and the shootings that came with it swept over that city. As a volunteer soccer coach for local kids, whose team would field as many players as could fit into my Ford Escort, I saw what gun violence does to a neighborhood. Now as someone trying to do something about that gun violence, I’ve met too many people who have lost loved ones to this problem. My goal has been to use data and the insights it can provide to identify policies capable of preventing gun violence by developing a better understanding of why gun violence happens in the first place.

For most of my career, that’s meant looking at whether fixing America’s many social problems—including poverty, racism, social isolation, inadequate schools, under-resourced neighborhoods, and gaps in the social safety net—could reduce the country’s problem with gun violence. If America were better at supporting and caring for its people and equalizing opportunity, would it become a less violent place?

After three decades of studying these dynamics, I’m sure the answer is yes. But I am also sure that we are, unfortunately, not anywhere close to fixing those problems as a society. Neither are we close to reining in the availability or lethality of guns, which, despite all the well-intentioned legislative efforts to the contrary, remain a ubiquitous part of American life.

Waiting and hoping for a better world—one free of injustice, free of illegal guns on the streets—is not a real plan. By continuing to treat gun violence as something that will get better once we fix everything else that’s wrong with society, we perpetuate levels of pain and loss that seem unacceptable for a country like the United States.

This book provides a new way of thinking about gun violence, because I fear the traditional way of thinking about it has proven too limited and unproductive. A new perspective, a new understanding of the problem, can give us new ideas about solutions and renewed hope that the daily headlines of lost lives and shattered families are not intractable parts of American life.

Eighteen years ago, I moved to Hyde Park to become a professor at the University of Chicago. I started a research center, the University of Chicago Crime Lab, to partner with the government and nonprofits to help reduce gun violence out in the real world—including on the South Side, a place caricatured by some as a hothouse of American lawlessness run amok. But the South Side isn’t just a politicized talking point about crime policy: it’s where I live, in a city I’ve come to love. I haven’t just spent a lot of time looking at data, I’ve also seen these problems up close, firsthand: countless hours spent in schools, parks, playgrounds, housing developments, courtrooms, jails, police stations, police cars, and lots and lots of McDonald’ses.

It’s hard to solve a problem we don’t understand.

Having gone down my share of dead ends in trying to understand gun violence myself, I can say that many of our assumptions about this problem have inadvertently made, and continue to make, the problem worse. So-called criminal behavior turns out to be—surprisingly—not that different from everyday human behavior: bad decisions made under stress in difficult situations. Approaching violence with the insights of the rapidly developing field of behavioral economics provides a new way to understand—and, to the extent possible, solve—this quintessentially American problem.

Reprinted with permission from Unforgiven Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence by Jens Ludwig, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2025 by Jens Ludwig. All rights reserved.