{"id":11488,"date":"2025-07-30T06:59:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-30T10:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11488"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:14:43","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:14:43","slug":"heat-of-the-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11488","title":{"rendered":"“Heat of the Moment”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Erica
\u00c9rica Rivas in Wild Tales<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Malcolm Gladwell\u2014always thought-provoking\u2014recently reviewed the new book Unforgiving Places<\/em><\/a> in The New Yorker<\/em> (9 June), which examines strategies to prevent violent crime. The book\u2019s author, Jens Ludwig, directs the University of Chicago Crime Lab<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ludwig\u2019s approach divides the phenomenon of gun violence into two main types, each of which has different motivations and modes of prevention. He believes the reason many preventive strategies fail (or fail to explain changes in homicide rates), is that what works for one type of violence doesn\u2019t work for the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, people vacillate between two major modes of thinking. One is fast, automatic, and intuitive. It\u2019s why Tony shot Maria\u2019s brother Bernardo in West Side Story<\/em>. Road rage is another example. This quick, unthinking response is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls \u201cSystem 1 thinking.\u201d By contrast, \u201cSystem 2 thinking\u201d involves deliberation and careful planning in order to gain something\u2014\u201ccash or phone or watch or drug turf.\u201d Often, revenge. And, again in West Side Story<\/em>, it\u2019s why Chino shoots Tony. The violence associated with System 2 thinking is a means to an end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unforgiving Places<\/em> points out our criminal-justice system has been designed to counter planned and deliberate System 2 crimes, when the real problem is those spontaneous, reactive ones, the homicides that occur in a moment of irrationality. According to FBI data, they account for more than three-fourths of murders committed over the past twenty years. The Chicago Police Department estimates that argumentsare at the root of between 70 and 80 percent of homicides in that city. (Say, between husband and wife, employer and employee, or in the picture from the short Argentinian film \u201cTill Death Do Us Part,\u201d above, even bride and groom.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back over the crime book reviews I\u2019ve written in the last few months, I find that when gun violence occurred in these stories, it is often of the more deliberate type, because the workings of the perpetrator\u2019s mind are important to the story, the crime\u2019s motivation, and its ultimate solution. But sometimes, both types occur: a spontaneous, \u201cheat of the moment\u201d crime leads to a chain of deliberate cover-up assassinations; or, conversely, tracking down the perpetrators of a well-planned crime leads to a deadly, reactive confrontation. But the two types of violence are definitely bifurcated in the way Ludwig describes, and the distinction between them makes perfect literary sense. Scott Turow\u2019s recent novel, Presumed Guilty<\/em>, is a good example of a crime thought to be a System 2 crime that turned out to be something very different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Malcolm Gladwell\u2014always thought-provoking\u2014recently reviewed the new book Unforgiving Places in The New Yorker (9 June), which examines strategies to prevent violent crime. The book\u2019s author, Jens Ludwig, directs the University of Chicago Crime Lab. Ludwig\u2019s approach divides the phenomenon of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,104,1596],"tags":[2284,2283,639,2282],"class_list":["post-11488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-the-morgue","category-true-crime","tag-crime-prevention","tag-criminal-justice","tag-malcolm-gladwell","tag-violence"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Zi","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11488"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11489,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11488\/revisions\/11489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}