America has a massive gun violence problem. Compared to other wealthy countries, the US murder rate is extremely high, and behind most of those deaths is the pull of a trigger.

The obvious solution is to ban guns. But, yeah, this is unlikely to happen.

Luckily , I have some good news. Social scientists have recently conducted extensive experiments that confirm that US gun violence CAN BE drastically reduced WITHOUT BANNING guns.

Take this remarkable study from the University of Pennsylvania, they tried something almost absurdly simple. Working with the city of Philadelphia, they mapped the tens of thousands of vacant lots scattered across its neighborhoods. Then, they randomly selected around 550 lots and cleaned them up—trimming the grass, removing the trash, AND clearing the broken bottles and needles.

These spaces went from abandoned wastelands… to usable, open community space. This simple change turned out to be a game changer. After just one year, the neighborhoods with restored lots experienced a powerful shift: people reported feeling safer, crime dropped, and even gun violence fell by nearly 30%… 30%!

No extra policing. No gun confiscation. No lifting entire communities out of poverty. Just a small change in the physical environment.

But why would a clean lot lower the chance of someone pulling a trigger?

To answer that, we spoke with Chicago professor Jens Ludwig —one of the leading researchers on gun violence. In his book Unforgiving Places, he argues that most people fundamentally misunderstand the nature of violent behavior. For decades, we’ve treated violence as a rational cost–benefit decisions. But, a deeper analysis of the motives for homicides reveal that only 20% of homicides are people being killed for a specific goal: things like shooting someone for revenge or trying to take their wallet. In contrast, almost 80% of homicides in Chicago arise not from such moments of calculated criminal intent, but rather from fights or arguments that escalate beyond control.

In other words, most shootings —by far— happen in short bursts of emotion —tiny windows of impulsive, reactive decision-making.

“””Gun violence comes from these 10 minute windows. We’ve historically spent enormous sums of money trying to change the incentives people face in those 10 minute windows. That has not worked. The murder rate in the United States today is almost exactly the same as it was in 1900.“””

But, as we’ve seen it does NOT have to be that way. As it turns out, the Impulsive nature of this 10 minute window of decision making is actually the key to reducing violence, that is… without banning guns.

But, to see exactly HOW this works, we first need to get the obvious out of the way.

1- Wouldn’t it just be much easier to ban guns?

According to the Small Arms Survey, the United States is the only country on Earth with more guns than people, with an estimated 120.5 firearms for every 100 residents. To grasp the magnitude of that figure, consider that the next country on the list that has 53 firearms per 100 people is… Yemen—a country that has literally been in a civil war for years. At the other end of the spectrum, countries like South Korea and Japan have gun-ownership rates close to zero and they also have some of the lowest homicide rates in the world.

Research on this is very clear, no this is not a massive coincidence!

“””the research that I’ve done and what other people have done show that when a place has more guns on net, the murder rate goes up. So whatever deterrent effect more gun ownership might have to prevent crime is outweighed by the effect of guns increasing the lethality of interpersonal conflict. “””

So at first glance, it seems pretty straightforward: fewer guns = fewer murders. This would also fit with our knowledge that almost 80% of murders are the consequence of emotional outbursts. If you give arguing emotional people guns, then of course some of these guns will be used, changing what could have been a black-eye into a gun wound.

However, firearms alone don’t tell the full story. Switzerland, for example, has a higher rate of gun ownership than Mexico, yet far lower homicide levels. So, something else must also be at play.

“””The way to think about this is like Gun Violence equals Guns + Violence. So gun availability matters but so does the willingness of people to hurt one another. “””

This is the key to understanding how scientists drastically reduced gun violence without banning guns. Rather than focusing on taking AWAY guns, which seems politically impossible in the US, they focused on reducing the chance a fight or argument would lead to an emotionally charged violent outburst.

“””That’s ultimately an optimistic insight into the problem because what suggests is that if the 4 million guns in the US are not going anywhere anytime soon, there is something else we can worry about with public policy in the meantime which is how do we change the willingness of people to hurt one another with guns.“””

2- The policies that actually have NOT worked, and why.

“””Most Americans think that violent behavior is due to one of two different explanations. So one sort of view is that violence is due to morally bad people who are not afraid of the criminal justice system. And that leads you to conclude, as you point out, that the only way to prevent gun violence is to threaten people with bigger criminal justice sticks. Most Americans who don’t believe in that conventional wisdom believe in a different conventional wisdom which is that violence is due to economic desperation. People will do whatever it takes to feed themselves and their families so the only thing that you can do to prevent gun violence is to make the alternatives to crime more lucrative so people make a different choice, so that’s more job prospects, more generous social policies, things like that.“””

So, according to conventional wisdom, to reduce violence you either need the carrot—subsidized jobs, food stamps, cash transfers, housing vouchers… OR… the stick—harsher penalties, more arrests, bigger prisons.

However, as we have seen, most violence BY FAR is not rational. Both the carrot and the stick approach target rational violence. People choosing to violently rob someone for money. Evil people choosing to murder someone. But crucially, they do NOT address violence emerging from emotionally charged arguments gone wrong.

With this knowledge in mind, it’s not surprising that policies aiming to reduce poverty DO NOT substantially reduce violent behavior. For example, a large experiment in Texas and Georgia randomly gave one group of people leaving prison a substantial income while withholding it from another, and roughly the same number of individuals in both groups ended up back in jail the following year.

Similarly, study after study after study that experimented with food stamps, subsidized jobs, or housing vouchers has found a consistent pattern: these programs DO reduce poverty (which is great!), and they do reduce property crimes (also very good!), but they tend to have little effect on violence.

So, the carrot doesn’t really work. But, what about the stick? Well, given that we have seen most violence are arguments gone wrong, you’d expect that doesn’t work either.

But, actually,

“””There is some evidence that increasing the incarceration rate does reduce violent crime. “””

How can this be, given that most violence is the consequence of emotional outbursts? Well, locking up people does work to an extent simply because it removes both some evil people with very violent intentions AND some of the people that are most prone to emotional outburst from society.

However, the more people you lock up, the higher the costs are to society, both because you have to pay for prisons and because you have fewer potential workers in the economy. On top of that,

“””In the US context is not clear how much further we have room to go, right? We have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world and, at the same time, the highest murder rate of any country in the world. “””

So yes, “sticks” can sometimes reduce violence, but they do so at a very high social cost. Meanwhile, “carrots” are effective for reducing poverty and lowering property crime, but they have a very limited impact on gun violence.

And the reason these approaches have fallen short is simply that both poverty and evil intent would lead to robberies or revenge types of violence. But, as we have seen, that’s not what is the leading cause of violence.

For more evidence, just look at this comparison of Chicago neighborhoods: it’s true that shootings are extremely rare in wealthy areas, but among equally poor neighborhoods the level of violence varies dramatically—some are extremely violent while others are far less so. If “poverty” or “bad morals” were the whole story, we would NOT see such huge differences among similarly poor neighborhoods. Something else is clearly going on.

According to professor Jens Ludwig, the solution has to do with

Behavioral economics

The branch of economics that focuses on human irrationality

“””If you think the solution is either bigger sticks or bigger carrots, you implicitly think the problem of gun violence or violent behavior is one of incentives. You imagine that before anybody ever pulls a trigger, they are more or less rationally or deliberately or carefully thinking through the pros and cons of what’s about to happen. But that’s not what most murders, most shootings in the United States actually are. The overwhelming share of murders stem from arguments. know, it’s some criminologists distinguish between instrumental violence and expressive violence. So instrumental violence is where the violence is a means to some other end. I want your drug selling corner. I want your phone or your wallet during a robbery. That’s about 20 % of murders in the US. 80 % are what criminologists call expressive, which is like, I am pissed off and the violence is not a means to an end. The violence is the point. I just want to hurt you because I’m deeply angry and frustrated at this other person. “””

So, not surprisingly, the truly successful studies about reducing violence have actually been about how to prevent an argument from escalating into violence.

In a nutshell social scientists found 2 ways to do this. The first is about what criminologists call “informal social control”. The basic idea is simple: when conflict begins to emerge, having responsible adults, neighbors, or community members nearby can defuse the situation before it escalates into violence.

In vibrant neighborhoods, there are plenty of “eyes on the street”—people know one another, look out for each other, and feel empowered to step in when tensions rise.

So, the first behavioral approach would be increasing the likelihood of external-interruption, that is, making it more likely that someone steps in before violence escalates. This is EXACTLY what the Pensylvania experiment we discussed in the introduction of this video achieved. It’s NOT that a nice neighborhood deters criminals in itself, but rather that

“””when you fix up a vacant lot and you turn it into a little pocket park, people are much more likely to now spend time out in public rather than hunker down in their homes. And shootings go down and not by a little, but by a lot on the order of like 20 or 30 % in low income neighborhoods.“””

Other studies examining the impact of improving street lighting or hiring additional security guards have reached similar conclusions: more eyes on the street lead to less violence. When someone intervenes early—whether a neighbor, a passerby, or a security guard—violence isn’t simply postponed. It’s prevented, because the moment of escalation passes before a snap decision of violence turns into a life changing event.

The second behavioral solution that actually works focuses on self-interruption—helping individuals manage those tense, emotionally charged “10-minute windows” themselves. This approach closely mirrors what psychologists describe as cognitive–behavioral techniques.

One of the most successful interventions of this kind is the Becoming a Man (BAM) program, developed by Youth Guidance. BAM works with young men in urban schools who face a heightened risk of dropping out or becoming involved in the justice system. Through structured, in-school group counseling sessions, the program teaches social-cognitive skills designed to help participants slow down, evaluate situations more clearly, and make wiser decisions in moments when their impulses might otherwise take over. Just listen to this participant of the program.

“””I’ve always known I had anger issues. As I kept going to BAM, the change I noticed in myself was more self control. I was walking in the hallway one time, and someone bumped into me. I started to feel myself getting real angry, like I wanted to react. I wanted to tell him about himself, smack him. Then I just thought about it He probably aint mean to do it on purpose. It was an accident. So I took a deep breath, calm down. I just walked to class.“””

“””In those real high-stakes moments, the ability to stop and reflect, the more space you can put between the stimulus and response, that’s where agency lives.“””

Jens Ludwig himself was in charge of evaluating the BAM program through several large scale randomized control trials implemented in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago, and the results were staggering..: the program improved school engagement, increased graduation rates by 12–19% and led to a staggering 45-50% decrease in violent arrests.

Even more impressive, when a version of the program was implemented with even higher-risk teenagers inside a Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, the results remained significant:

“””we saw that there’s a statistically, there’s like a 20 % reduction in recidivism for the people at highest estimated risk for violence in Chicago, “””

An YES, a 20 to 50% reduction in violent crime is enormous. And unlike the massive costs of the U.S. prison system, these interventions are:

“””basically free. You’ve got the kids, you’ve got the building, you’ve got the guards, the marginal cost, the extra cost is basically just like a week of training for the guards and photocopying the booklets. It’s as close to free as anything ever gets. “””

which brings us to our

Conclusion

Which is that , with the exception of making the case for taking guns away, most of the popular debate around violence in the U.S. is misinformed. Most violence by far are arguments gone wrong. It’s about emotional, not rational decision making.

Therefore, BOTH the stick and the carrot largely fail. On the other hand, programs like Becoming a Man (BAM) or environmental changes such as cleaning up neighborhoods are cheap easy ways to drastically reduce gun violence because they either increase informal control or because they teach people to better control their emotions themselves.

Of course, this is not an excuse NOT to reduce poverty, or a deflection from the fact that YES giving lots of emotional people guns leads to more gun deaths.

No, it’s just an interesting insight from behavioral science that can help make the world a better place, which is hopefully why you watch this channel. Let me know in the comments if this surprised you as much as it did me.