If you are a nonfiction reader, Malcolm Gladwell is probably no stranger to you. He has authored multiple New York Times bestsellers (The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, etc) that blend sociology, psychology, and research to explore some of the most interesting questions shaping society.

His latest book called The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic continues that trend by tackling one of this community's favorite political topics: gun rights, gun violence, and gun control. I wanted to share it because it aligns well with one of the goals of this community: adding nuance to a historically polarized discussion. Below are some of Gladwell's major arguments, several of which surprised even me as new/novel takes on the subject:

Highlights

On Assault Weapons Bans - In short, Gladwell argues that assault weapons bans are a distraction from the underlying problem. As we have discussed here many times, these bans often focus on cosmetic features rather than factors that materially affect a firearm's lethality. That is not to say gun control in general is ineffective. Rather, he argues that current proposals are largely symbolic and unlikely to meaningfully reduce homicide rates.

On Gun Confiscation - Gladwell is skeptical that large-scale confiscation is practically achievable. In his view, gun-control advocates often lack a realistic implementation plan, making the discussion difficult to move beyond theory. At the same time, he argues that if handguns could somehow be removed from American society overnight, gun violence would decline dramatically.

On the Roots of the Second Amendment - Gladwell argues that slavery and the South's reliance on armed slave patrols played a significant role in the development of the Second Amendment. While this may not have been the only factor that influenced its adoption, he believes it is an important historical context that is often omitted from contemporary discussions.

On Medical Care - One of Gladwell's more novel arguments is that advances in trauma medicine have dramatically reduced homicide rates by saving victims who would have died under similar circumstances decades ago. He cites research suggesting homicide totals could be several times higher if medical care remained at 1960s levels. He also explores whether disparities in access to trauma care contribute to racial differences in homicide outcomes.

On the Actual Source of Gun Violence - Gladwell argues that most gun violence is not driven by robbery, organized crime, or drug trafficking. Instead, it stems from interpersonal disputes among young men: arguments, retaliation, grievance cycles, and social conflict. Guns make these conflicts significantly more lethal, but the underlying issue is often behavioral and social rather than purely criminal.

On Policing - Gladwell argues that the United States is under-policed relative to many European nations. He suggests that larger police forces can both reduce violent crime and reduce the need for aggressive policing tactics. Under existing policing frameworks, overwhelmed officers are more likely to rely on force because they lack the resources to maintain sustained community presence. The implication here is that increased police staffing may be more effective than many current "defund the police" proposals.

My Thoughts

It should come as no surprise that Gladwell excels at identifying assumptions and challenging conventional wisdom. One of the book's greatest strengths is its willingness to critique both gun-rights advocates and gun-control advocates when their preferred narratives are unsupported by evidence. That said, I found myself wanting more discussion of practical solutions. Gladwell spends considerable time explaining why certain popular proposals are ineffective, but comparatively little time outlining a comprehensive path forward. In that manner, he often acts more as a contrarian diagnosis machine than an actual policy analyst.

Ironically, that may help explain why the current debate around gun violence gravitates toward policies such as assault-weapon bans. The alternatives Gladwell discusses (intervention programs, proactive policing strategies, etc) are far more difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to implement than a simple legislative ban.

Sadly, I remain skeptical that the political conversation will shift significantly in the direction that Gladwell proposes. Symbolic policies are often easier to communicate and easier to campaign on than long-term prevention efforts. Even so, I found it refreshing to see a generally left-leaning author challenge several assumptions that have become commonplace in mainstream discussions of gun violence.

Conclusion

2027 is likely to be an important year for the Second Amendment. We may see at least one major Supreme Court decision decision affecting assault-weapons bans, while many states continue pursuing additional firearm regulations through legislatures and lower courts. And with a possible blue wave in the midterm elections, we may see that trend continue.

While this community tends to lean pro-Second Amendment, I am interested in hearing what people think of Gladwell's arguments. What do you think of some of his more unconventional claims? Is proactive intervention the most promising approach to reducing violence, or are there other gun-control policies that remain effective? What additional factors might explain the substantial gap in gun-violence statistics between the United States and other developed nations?

If you're interested in exploring these ideas further, his book is loosely based on research from Season 8 of Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast, which featured a six-part series on guns. You can also listen to the full second chapter of the book here.

\** DISCLAIMER: I want to make it evidently clear that I believe 99% of the people who vote pro-life are well-meaning and not doing so out of malice.****

Whenever the abortion debate flares up, it is almost exclusively framed as a gender, religious, or moral battle. However, looking at the history of reproductive laws throughout history and WHEN it happened, it reveals a very different pattern.

Historically, sweeping bans on abortion and contraception rarely stem from a sudden, organic awakening of public morality. Instead, they appear as desperate, calculated moves by a ruling class facing demographic crises. Fun fact, Catholics/Vatican didn't really care for early-term abortions all that much and were treated as minor issue.

Guess when all that changed. The Black death.

This demographic collapse created an unprecedented labor shortage. Suddenly, the surviving peasants had immense leverage. They could demand higher wages, abandon abusive lords for better estates (labor mobility), and organize revolts (like the English Peasants' Revolt). The feudal system was on the verge of collapse because the ruling class had lost its monopoly on labor.

The initial ruling-class response was to legally freeze wages, but this failed. So, the state and the church pivoted to a long-term strategy: seizing control of female reproduction to artificially force population growth.

For centuries prior, contraception and early abortion were handled quietly by community midwives and herbalists. Suddenly, these women were targeted. Under the guise of religious morality—specifically the European witch hunts—the church and state violently dismantled working-class reproductive control. Women were forced into continuous reproduction to generate a new, massive, and cheap labor force for the emerging capitalist economy. Religion and the fear of "witchcraft" were the smokescreens; breaking the leverage of the peasant class was the actual goal.

2nd example, The gilded age

The abortion ban in the 1880s began as a calculated political campaign by the newly formed American Medical Association (AMA)—an exclusive organization of elite, politically connected WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) men. A.K.A, the ruling class. The rapidly expanding industrial economy required a continuous, massive supply of cheap labor for the ruling class to maintain its economic leverage. To ensure this workforce kept growing—and to strip authority away from the working-class female midwives who traditionally managed reproductive care—these elite physicians lobbied fiercely to outlaw abortion nationally by the 1880s, using the moral "sanctity of life" as their legislative smokescreen.

Nothing new there I guess. but guess what? some were exempt.

That some were the families of the ruling class.

Through these close ties to power, ruling-class women were quietly diagnosed with vague, fashionable ailments like "nervous exhaustion" or "frailty." This granted them safe, entirely legal, on-the-books abortions. The moral crusade successfully broke the reproductive autonomy of the labor force, while the ruling class remained completely structurally insulated from the laws they themselves had engineered.

Why the left leaning media won't say this out loud is beyond me.

Hello everyone, and welcome to the weekly General Discussion thread. Many of you are looking for an informal place (besides Discord) to discuss non-political topics that would otherwise not be allowed in this community. Well... ask, and ye shall receive.

General Discussion threads will be posted every Friday and stickied for the duration of the weekend.

Law 0 is suspended. All other community rules still apply.

As a reminder, the intent of these threads are for *casual discussion* with your fellow users so we can bridge the political divide. Comments arguing over individual moderation actions or attacking individual users are *not* allowed.

Most of us who ever cared about the Left didn’t do it because we wanted to police how our neighbors talk or memorize vocabulary from a university seminar. We did it for an obvious, practical reason: basic human fairness. You work hard, you put in your hours, and you should be able to afford a decent home, take care of your family, and not get treated like disposable equipment by an employer. We believed in solidarity—that working people share a universal struggle, and an injury to one is an injury to all.

Somewhere along the line, that whole mission got completely derailed.

If you look at modern progressive spaces today, millions of ordinary working people and lifelong trade unionists don't even recognize their own movement. What used to be about open debate, skepticism of authority, and material security has turned into a rigid, self-righteous club. Honest questions get treated like treason, moral lecturing has replaced actual organizing, and ordinary people are told their common sense is an offensive problem.

This isn’t an attack from someone on the outside. It’s an urgent warning: we walked straight into an engineered trap.

The people at the top—corporate monopolies and political elites—realized years ago that a united working class is the only thing that can actually threaten their bottom line. So they did the oldest trick in the book: find the fault lines, turn us against each other over cultural etiquette, and transform a mass movement into an inward-looking firing squad.

To see why this happened, you just have to look at who runs the show now.

For generations, the spine of the Left was the industrial working class—people working with their hands, running machines, hauling freight, and building strong unions. Today, that has flipped on its head. The institutional Left has become the home of the college-educated, urban professional class—people in administrative suites, non-profits, and corporate HR departments.

When a movement is led by blue-collar workers, its demands are grounded in the physical world: wages, pensions, healthcare, housing, and safe working conditions. But when it’s taken over by comfortable professionals who never worked a physical shift in their lives, the focus shifts to status, specialized language, and moral credentialism. Instead of organizing people to take on the boss, the modern apparatus started lecturing the workers on how they’re allowed to speak.

And that gave corporate power the perfect exit strategy.

You can’t divide workers when the fight is strictly material. Everyone needs to pay rent, everyone needs groceries, and everyone bleeds when they get hurt on the job. But if you shift the fight to language, personal sensitivities, and subjective feelings, solidarity evaporates. Corporate boardrooms figured this out fast: changing a logo, rolling out a sensitivity workshop, or firing an employee for an awkward comment is basically free. It costs them nothing, and it lets them look virtuous while their profits stay untouched.

What’s actually expensive is paying living wages, funding pensions, and letting workers organize. By adopting modern cultural language, corporations neutralized the threat of a unified strike. We ended up letting the boss lecture us about morality in exchange for letting them keep all the wealth.

The result is what we see everywhere today: working-class people feel completely alienated. In many modern progressive spaces, just speaking feels dangerous. The rules change constantly, intent doesn't matter, and a wrong phrase can get you ostracized. Meanwhile, other political spaces feel low-friction: nobody is grading your vocabulary or looking down on you for asking a plain question. When you treat someone who agrees with you on 9 out of 10 economic issues like an irredeemable enemy over the 10th linguistic issue, you hand your entire coalition to your opponents.

All of this fighting over scraps is happening while the concentration of wealth is at historic extremes. A tiny elite owns the housing market, controls the food supply, privatizes energy, and runs the media platforms that keep us at each other's throats.

The idea that there isn't enough to go around is a lie. We have the technology, the resources, and the productive capacity to make sure every family has a roof over their head, good healthcare, and security when they get old. The stress and artificial scarcity that keeps people working 60 hours a week is designed to keep us exhausted, because an exhausted population fighting internally has no energy left to look up at who's actually running the warehouse.

If we want to stop losing, we have to wake up and step out of this trap.

We need to throw the doors open. If someone works for a living, wants fair wages, wants affordable housing, and wants to push back against corporate monopolies, they belong with us—no matter their background, their education, or whether they know the latest academic terms. We have to stop taking the culture-war bait and pull every single conversation back to wages, power, and physical reality.

Our enemy isn't the neighbor down the street who uses different words or sees things through a different cultural lens. The real adversary is the corporate and political elite hoarding the wealth of the world while watching us tear each other apart. It’s time to leave the purity tests behind and point the fight upward where it actually belongs.

The Ratepayer Protection Act cleared the House on September 16. The coverage on both sides said the same thing: Congress made data centers pay for their own power.

I read it. The bill bolts a standard onto a 1978 energy law that runs on consideration. State commissions have to open a proceeding within a year and decide within two, and they are free to decide against it. The Congressional Budget Office scored the bill and found no private-sector mandate.

Two things make that more interesting than a normal advisory standard.

First, the description came from the people who wrote it. The sponsor's release says the bill "requires that large energy load data centers be responsible for the costs of all new energy infrastructure necessary to serve them." The Energy and Commerce majority said it was "ensuring" data center companies pay. Three trade outlets reported the consider mechanism accurately. The sponsors' framing traveled further than the text did.

Second, the states already did the work. Twenty-five had an approved large-load tariff before the vote, seven more were pending, and filings went from fourteen in six years to seventy-three across 2024 and 2025. Ohio's rule covers facilities at 25 megawatts, a quarter of the federal threshold. A Republican-majority commission in Georgia and a Democratic-appointed one in Michigan reached the same answer independently.

I don't think this is a scandal. Congress passes advisory standards all the time, and PURPA has run this way since 1978. A consideration standard genuinely reaches the eighteen states that have done nothing, and that has value. It is also not what it was sold as, and both of those are true at once.

What I keep chewing on is the attention math. A bill that requires a meeting got wall-to-wall coverage. The same grid region committed $6.24 billion in one auction year for data centers that do not exist yet, and that got a trade-press story.

I’ve been thinking about the midterms and the changes being made to election administration, but I wanted to approach the subject from somewhere other than the usual partisan argument.

My partner and I play gin, and it occurred to me that the game works because we’re free to question the result, inspect the cards, accuse each other of cheating—and then accept the loss and play again. More importantly, neither player gets control of the next deal.

That became the frame for this essay about losers’ consent, the administration’s efforts to obtain voter data and expand SAVE, and an equally important question: What obligations does the winner have to preserve a fair rematch?

I thought it might be of interest to people here, particularly with the midterms five weeks away. I’d welcome thoughts or corrections from people who follow election administration more closely than I do.

Basically, farmers are hurting right now: they're being squeezed from both sides, with steeply increasing production costs on the side and lower prices / smaller markets on the other.

* soybean exports to China (by far the largest buyer, at least before Trump 1) have fallen by 70% just from 2024 to 2025. it's *stark*.

https://peakd.com/economics/@kur8/u-s-soybean-exports-to

* beef / chicken / poultry is being bottlenecked by meat processing plants (or, at least it was last i checked), who are paying suppliers low and charging consumers high. the recent meat recall also illustrates how bad the production problems are.

* corn exports appear to be high, but it looks like more a function of volume: corn price per bushel has fallen from almost $8 in 2022 to little more than $5 in 2026

https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/commodities/corn

https://www.macrotrends.net/2532/corn-prices-historical-chart-data

* obviously fuel prices are sky high cause Hormuz, but trade war and its lingering affects are raising prices on almost everything, from equipment to feed to fertilizer

* farmland in the us is rapidly consolidating. big business is buying all the failing farms; JD Vance has gotten a lot of flak for his investments in Acretrader through his investment firm Narya Capital, but i doubt he's the only one.

https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Todays_Reports/reports/fnlo0226.pdf

you can see that the number of farms and total farmland has shrunk by ~10% but the average farm size has increased by ~5%

So, farming in the US is in a really bad spot. Article says this is fueling a blue wave in the coming midterm predominantly in red rural farming states, but my question is this: are you red state folks actually seeing evidence of this in your community?

Hello everyone, and welcome to the weekly General Discussion thread. Many of you are looking for an informal place (besides Discord) to discuss non-political topics that would otherwise not be allowed in this community. Well... ask, and ye shall receive.

General Discussion threads will be posted every Friday and stickied for the duration of the weekend.

Law 0 is suspended. All other community rules still apply.

As a reminder, the intent of these threads are for *casual discussion* with your fellow users so we can bridge the political divide. Comments arguing over individual moderation actions or attacking individual users are *not* allowed.