The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic by Malcolm Gladwell. notes/quotes'Jj's reflections/related

4:05 "what we don't understand about lethal violence in this country is that homicide's a function of two facts. The level of violence, but but also how good your health care is, your access to emergency medicine. And our doctors have gotten so good that they have disguised the problem. Someone did a study once that said if we just kept medicine at 1960s levels, we'd have 75 ,000 homicides in this country every year."

what is that compared to? via ask.brave.com:

2025: ~14,085–15,840 homicides (rate: 4.1–4.8 per 100,000)

2024: ~15,795–17,940 homicides (rate: 5.1–5.5 per 100,000)


Two kinds of violence:
instrumental vs expressive

Instrumental violence = premeditated (most often, or primed somehow to be a trigger happy opportunist) towards a an extrinsic goal, ie, money, or some other sort of transferrable stored utility (therefore alienated or at least alienatable?) or otherwise secretly consumable 'valuable'

Expressive violence = having means or lesser asymmetrical force projection imbalance, inability (or for some reason desire?) to use one's words / suspend (much less identify & dislodge) one's way of listening (aka, perspective or 'experience') & strong enough feelings that one's time preferences severely raises.


via ask.brave.com's median generated explanation:

In The American Way of Killing, Gladwell distinguishes between instrumental violence — a premeditated criminal act committed in pursuit of a broader goal (the kind depicted in police procedurals) — and expressive violence — impulsive, heat-of-the-moment eruptions of anger, like a fight over a slight that escalates to a shooting. He argues that most American gun homicides are expressive, not instrumental, and that our public-safety system is built around deterring the former (through punishment and legal consequences) while being largely ineffective against the latter, since a person acting in a rage isn't calculating consequences. This reframing, he says, is why the standard approach to gun violence has "missed the mark."

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