Page 130 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

in the United States—and the problem with that, of course, is that handguns are uniquely deadly. Handguns are America’s town
gas. What would happen if the U.S. did what the British did, and somehow eradicated its leading cause of suicide? It’s not hard
to imagine. It would uncouple the suicidal from their chosen method. And those few who were determined to try again would
be forced to choose from far-less-deadly options, such as overdosing on pills, which is fifty-five times less likely to result in
death than using a gun. A very conservative estimate is that banning handguns would save 10,000 lives a year, just from
thwarted suicides. That’s a lot of people.
4 Suicides happen on the Golden Gate with such devastating regularity that in 2004 filmmaker Eric Steel put a video camera at
either end of the bridge and wound up filming twenty-two suicides over the course of the year. In the death that served as the
signature case study in Steel’s subsequent documentary, The Bridge, his camera followed a thirty-four-year-old man named
Gene Sprague for ninety-three minutes as he paced back and forth across the bridge before jumping to his death. If you stand
on the bridge long enough, you can expect to see someone try to jump off.
5 Thirty-four percent, in fact, predicted that everyone thwarted at the bridge would simply switch to another method.
6 Take a look at a map Weisburd made of Seattle (page 369). Those dots are Seattle’s crime “hot spots.” If you talk to someone
from Seattle, they will tell you their city has some bad areas. But the map tells you that statement is false. Seattle does not have
bad neighborhoods; it has a handful of problematic blocks scattered throughout the city. What distinguishes those problematic
blocks from the rest of the city? A jumble of factors, acting in combination. Hot spots are more likely to be on arterial roads,
more likely to have vacant lots, more likely to have bus stops, more likely to have residents who don’t vote, more likely to be
near a public facility such as a school. The list of variables—some of which are well understood and many of which are not—
goes on. And because most of those variables are pretty stable, those blocks don’t change much over time.