Malcolm Gladwell has made a career of promoting iconoclastic arguments, and this book targets a doozy: gun violence in the United States.
Here, Gladwell attacks all sides of the debate, from accusing Second-Amendment crusaders of intentionally misreading history (& language) to accusing “defund the Police” activists of myopically misrepresenting the cause of cop violence.
And Gladwell scores some very palpable hits. His evidence that America is actually under-policed is compelling, and the logic behind his dismantling of the precedents behind the current legal standing of the Second Amendment is pretty damning, though frankly pedantic.
His other conclusions (that an assault-rifle ban would be useless and misguided; that medical advances & our collective silence regarding suicide are hiding the true casualty-rate of national gun violence; and that structural racism is a significant factor in determining both who actually dies from getting shot and who actually gets prosecuted for homicide) are, to my mind, even stronger and more provocative than the 2 big-ticket assertions that evoke most coverage of this book.
But the overarching argument — and underlying motivation for writing this book — that Gladwell makes is that our “intentional dishonesty” in our national discussion of gun violence is getting people needlessly killed. And he sure nails that one!
Get THE AMERICAN WAY OF KILLING by Malcolm Gladwell here: https://a.co/d/0f4CVMpC
No comments:
Post a Comment