2025-05-14
9 分钟NPR. Jens Ludwig is an economist at the University of Chicago.
And for years, he's been obsessed with one of America's most intractable problems, gun violence.
According to Pew Research, the vast majority of murderers are committed with guns.
And that's why, in the mid-2000s,
Jens moved to Chicago's South Side, looking for an answer to this question.
What leads a person to shoot another?
And what can we do about it?
His research led him to all kinds of places.
You know, I spent a huge amount of time out in schools, in parks.
in courtrooms, in police stations, in the back of police cars,
and in tons and tons of McDonald's all over the city as well.
What happens at the McDonald's?
One of the key things that happens in a McDonald's that doesn't happen in an office is you talk to people
like they're real people,
and they talk to you like you're a real person.
After hours and hours of McDonald's conversations and years of crunching data,
Yen says he now knows a lot more about what causes gun violence.
And the answer is not.
what a lot of us have been told.
No wonder we haven't made more progress on this problem.