Gladwell Shoots the Numbers
Gladwell Shoots the Numbers
Narratives and nuance for how we talk about guns.
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Gladwell Shoots the Numbers
Famous raconteur Malcolm Gladwell has a new podcast series out (from Pushkin) about gun violence in America. Specifically, he interrogates how we talk about guns. The series shines with statistical style. I found Gladwell’s numbers, and their presentation, fascinating.
Guns are a contentious topic in America. Gladwell avoids solutioneering our problems with gun violence, choosing instead to poke holes in both sides of the modern debate. He reveals how messy historic precedent really is, disarms modern talking points, and—most excitedly—elevates and generates simple statistical comparisons that changed how I understand the world.
I saw many visions in my head while hearing his numbers. I’ve illustrated three of these visions below, paired with transcripts from his episodes.
Getting out of Dodge
Gunsmoke was an American television drama series. It centered on Dodge City during the 1870s settlement of the American West. One of the most popular and successful TV shows of all time, Gunsmoke ran for twenty years, from 1955 to 1975.
Its years are important because our current class of baby-boomer leaders grew up on Gunsmoke. Its depictions of bad-guy outlaws and good-guy-with-a-gun heroes twisted its audience’s understanding of history, and guns. Here’s Gladwell in Part 2 of his series with a little more context:
Every other episode begins with a shot of [sheriff] Dillon squaring off against a bad guy in the main street of Dodge. He out draws him, shoots the bad guy dead, then after the credits, we see Dillon walking through a cemetery where all the many dead are buried and in voiceover delivering a little homily about the enormous weight on his shoulders.
Gladwell’s statistical opportunity lies in the original decision to situate this TV drama in a historic place, Dodge City. The real Dodge was the “queen of the cow towns”—an infamous hub with Longhorn cowboys and outlaws and, yes, homicides.
But how many homicides? Did the real Dodge City have as many shootouts as the TV version? Was it every cowboy for himself? The show insisted that not carrying a gun was as good as suicice. There was no protection but the six-shooter in your holster.
Gladwell’s assistant, Tali Emlen, counted every TV gunshot (212 in season one), and every TV homicide (59 in season one). Then, Gladwell takes the total homicides and divides it by the historic population to arrive at
a homicide rate of I think 4,917 per 100,000, which would be like eight times higher than the highest homicide rate in any city in the United States today.
So, the TV town was scary dangerous. But how did it compare to the real history? A clear historical picture emerges after assembling murder reports, court records, and graveyard burials.
In 1872, the year Dodge City was founded, the homicide count was 18, which in a town of 1,200 people is nuts. But that was before the town had a police force. They promptly got themselves a county sheriff and for the next couple of years, there are no homicides at all. . . . The real Dodge City is nothing like the mythical Dodge City. The real Dodge City is proof that law and order works. You bring in a lawman and the place goes back to normal, which is a hundred percent the opposite lesson of television's Dodge City, isn't it?
Here is how I picture all this.
Gladwell’s Gunsmoke analysis is cute. No one can seriously fault the show for fabricating extra excitement. It wouldn’t have an audience if it was like the real town. To me, it’s a vivid reminder that what you see in the movies (and on the TV news, and social media, and ... ), is not reality.
Moral Hazard
As you listen to the series, Gladwell’s episodes emerge from history to the present day, becoming more serious.
Part 4 is devoted to landing a simple observation: miracle advances in modern medicine is what’s preventing our rampant gun violence from being recorded as rampant gun deaths. We do not recognize the crisis because so many gunshot victims, who would have died a couple decades earlier, are now saved by trauma surgeons.
Today, American trauma surgeons are extraordinarily good at saving lives. (They’ve gotten a lot of practice working on gunshot wounds over the last few decades.) One surgeon explained the leap in their ability over the last 50 years as “the difference between a bicycle and electric car.”
Moral hazard. If someone else is doing the work of taking care of us and lowering our risk, we have the freedom to behave like idiots.
Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to see this medical phenomenon in the data. As a nation, we track gun fatalities, not gun nonfatalities. There is no national measure of how many people got shot, no matter the outcome: “bullet-to-skin” contacts.
That is just a measure of how many bullets have hit people in a given community over the previous year. Which makes more sense, right? Because now we've corrected for the bias caused by doctors saving so many more lives. The problem is that that bullet-to-skin number doesn't exist. No one pulls that statistic out. The police lump all those cases in the general category of aggravated assault, mixed in with punches and shoves.
Natalie Hipple, a criminologist at Indiana University, is working to correct this picture. She’s leading a team to comb through thousands of aggravated assault cases from the city of Indianapolis, picking out gun non-fatalities. Charting data from her 2022 paper yields two views that we should be able to produce longitudinally, across America.
But we can’t. Today, as a nation, all we can see is the chart on the left. We can’t build the chart on the right across the country, much less across time.
Damned on Arrival
Gladwell builds on the miracle medicine story in the last episode, Part 5. If you’ve been shot, and you are not killed instantly, you need to be on a level-one trauma bed as soon as possible. Every minute counts after you’ve been shot.
But trauma centers are expensive loss-leaders for a hospital system. We don’t build them for uninsured communities.
A trauma desert is what ER docs call places that are a long way from a level one trauma center.
What happens to people who have to travel far to reach a trauma center? Elizabeth Tung, physician at the University of Chicago, found that Chicago Black-majority census tracts were seven times disproportionately in these trauma deserts compared to White-majority census tracts. Seven times.
Black Chicagoans experienced longer times for EMTs to arrive, longer trips to the trauma center, and relatively more death from gunshot wounds—all because their neighborhoods are trauma deserts.
Gladwell cites a 1995 paper to put some numbers on the impact. It did a simple, clever analysis of convicted women murderers in an Alabama prison.
Gundlach and Hanke looked at all the murderers in Tutwiler [Prison] and divided them by race. First, the white murders. There were 47 people victimized by white women who died instantly. No amount of medical attention would've saved them. Headshot. Bullet to the heart.
And a roughly equal number who were dead on arrival: those who could at least theoretically have lived if they'd gotten medical attention sooner. The ratio of killed instantly to dead on arrival was essentially one to one.
Then Gundlach and Hanke looked at the victims of Black murderers. What was their ratio? It wasn't one to one. It was way out of whack. There were many, many more victims who died on the way to the hospital. And also a far higher percentage who died at some point after being admitted.
What the study suggested was that a big chunk of the difference in homicide rates between Blacks and whites in Alabama had to do with the quality of healthcare given to their victims, not the violent tendencies of the people who attacked them.
I pulled the numbers from the original paper, and arranged them below to highlight the excess death among victims of Black murderers.
Each excess death is not only a lost life. It also represents an excess murder conviction. The paper concludes, after examining additional data not shown here, that
”almost one fourth of the African American female killers might not have been in prison for the killing, had their victims received the same transportation and medical care as their Caucasian counterparts."
They would have been convicted on lesser charges like aggravated assault. They wouldn't be murderers.
It’s an elegant study that connects income inequality, racism, the prison-industrial complex, and our American health system and gun violence.
If you appreciated the style of my charts in this edition then you will love the 1939 statistical album USSR, executed with Isotype flair. See it beautifully photographed by David Rumsey.
Onward!—RJ
About
Data storyteller RJ Andrews helps organizations solve high-stakes problems by using visual metaphors and information graphics: charts, diagrams, and maps. His passion is studying the history of information graphics to discover design insights. See more at infoWeTrust.com.
RJ’s recently published series, Information Graphic Visionaries, a new book series celebrating three spectacular data visualization creators. With new writing, complete visual catalogs, and discoveries never seen by the public. His first book Info We Trust, How to Inspire the World with Data—will be published in a remastered edition in 2024.