Apr 2025
Unforgiving Places- Coming April 2025
Topics
Crime Lab Pritzker Director Jens Ludwig authored a book that argues the lack of progress in reducing gun violence ultimately stems from our having misunderstood the nature of the problem, and that behavioral science gives us a new way to understand – and solve – gun violence in America.
Book Events
2/19/25 – Chicago Booth’s Think Better Speaker Series in Chicago, IL
4/23/25 – The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, CA
5/1/25 – Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC
What if everything we understood about gun violence was wrong?
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.
Topics
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.
Coauthor of Freakonomics
Gun violence is not just about guns; it’s about guns plus violence. It’s having lots of guns around, but also having people who use them to hurt other people. If we can’t make much progress on the gun-access part of things, the good news is that there’s a second path to progress, which is to try and change the willingness of people to use guns to hurt other people.
Author, Unforgiving Places
Local Gun Violence Dashboards
Chicago’s Violence Reduction Dashboard, launched by the Crime Lab in 2021, is featured in a toolkit created by Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund as a part of its Gun Violence Data Fellowship.
Valuing the benefits of reducing firearm violence in the United States
This paper estimates the monetized value of the impact of reducing firearm violence and how that value is distributed across the population.
IL Office of Firearm Violence Prevention
The University of Chicago Crime Lab has partnered with the Illinois Office of Firearm Violence Prevention (OFVP) in support of the OFVP’s goal to use data to focus resources. The Crime Lab prepared the following interactive map to support the RPSA Youth Development Services grantmaking process.
United States Surgeon General’s Advisory on Firearm Violence in America
United States Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a landmark advisory declaring firearm violence in America to be a public health crisis with devastating and far-reaching consequences for the nation’s health and well-being.
Latest Updates
Are We Thinking About Gun Violence All Wrong?
Crime Lab Pritzker Director Jens Ludwig sat down with Jerusalem Demsas for The Atlantic’s Good on Paper podcast to preview his upcoming book, “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence,” and discuss the behavioral science-informed solutions that could reduce gun violence in American cities.
Unforgiving Places: The Behavioral Science of Ending Gun Violence
In this talk hosted by Chicago Booth’s Think Better Speaker Series, Jens Ludwig argued that the lack of progress in reducing gun violence ultimately stems from our having misunderstood the nature of the problem, and that behavioral science gives us a new way to understand – and solve – gun violence in America.
Jens Ludwig — Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence
Join Crime Lab Pritzker Director Jens Ludwig for a book talk and signing at Politics and Prose Bookstore at Union Market in Washington, DC for his upcoming book, “Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence.”
