Have you ever interrupted some axe-grinder mid-rant by asking “Who is the ‘they’”? The latest in editorial pandemics brings up the question: “Who is we?” All over the e-zines and some print media, readers are hit with titles beginning “what we get wrong about …. “ — you name it. Taking the bait won’t pay off in any enlightening revelations. Clicking onto one about Davey Crockett and the Alamo revealed the very same facts I got out of Robert Penn Warren’s “Remember the Alamo” in 5th grade. It was published in 1958.
What they misunderstand is that dangerous felons only understand overwhelming physical subjugation.
Stale facts are bad enough. This literary affliction gets worse as it moves up the food chain. In the case covered here, an expert explains to the laity that deadly violence is one big misunderstanding.
Zohran Mamdami called The New Yorker “The greatest magazine in the world” recently. If he could hold that larcenous streak down to only stealing lines, the city might have a chance. Does the mayor-elect know that the original editor of the periodical, Harold Ross, beat him to it by nearly a century? Of course, Zo and Harold could mean two different things. Ross said it when the weekly was owned by yeast fortune heir Raoul Fleischmann. In the clutches of Conde-Nast, Eustace Tilley is taking on the look of Alfred E. Neuman stripped of the wit. Sounding like a school-marmy noodge without a clue is a fate that would worry Alfred E. himself.
What We Get Wrong About …
The once revered non-fiction force, Malcolm Gladwell, pulled the cord on the brainiac bus with: “What We Get Wrong About Violent Crime.” Gladwell focuses on the fatal shooting of Jeremy Brown in Chicago’s south side June 2023. A woman named Carlishia Hood, Brown found, was taking too long ordering her burgers at Maxwell Street Express. Jeremy, whose local nom-de-guerre was “the Knock-Out King,” went off on the lady. When she answered back defiantly, the soon-to-be victim started landing blows on her. The King was busy meting out his discipline when Hood’s 14-year-old son unleashed the leaden brand of retribution at 750-feet-per-second.
Anybody who wasn’t raised Mennonite, like Gladwell, might have found this end inevitable for a guy with no qualms about publicly pummeling a woman in south Chicago. What “we” don’t get, Malcolm patiently explains, is that this is an example of “System 1 thinking.” The term comes from a high-brow breakdown of violent interaction by University of Chicago Economics professor Jens Ludwig in the book “Unforgiving Places.” Put simply, in momentary heat people do less thinking and that’s when they hurt people. And, when you’ve got a system going on, can it really be their fault?
You see Brown, “made an immediate egocentric assumption: if he knew that special orders were a norm violation, then Hood must know, too. “Given that System 1 assumption,” Ludwig explains, “from there it is natural that Brown believed the person in front of him was deliberately holding things up.”
Alas, if Maxwell Street had adopted the jingle — “Special orders do upset us” — a life might have been saved. Speaking of “assumptions,” how “natural” is it to assume beating someone — even a man — to a pulp for being a slowpoke, is anything less than criminal pathology? Gladwell thinks: “Neither Jeremy Brown nor Hood’s son was evil.” Did Brown’s nickname mean anything to this author? Did he think the dead man had spent time in the ring? We — oops — have all considered throttling nuisance customers ahead of us in line. Anyone who actually assaults human speed-bumps while enduring this kind of frustration needs caging. Decent people rarely even say anything.
If you don’t believe the ivory tower has risen to oxygen deprived heights, listen to this:
Ludwig argues that this is what most homicide looks like. Much of what gets labelled [sic] gang violence, he says, is really just conflict between individuals who happen to be in gangs. We misread these events because we insist on naming the affiliations of the combatants. Imagine, he suggests, if we did this for everyone: ‘This morning by Buckingham Fountain, a financial analyst at Morningstar killed a mechanic for United Airlines.’ Naturally you’d think the place of employment must be relevant to understanding of the shooting, otherwise why mention it at all?’”
If Ludwig pulled his head from the clouds and read a newspaper once in a while, he’d know they do mention it. Physicians, like Sam Sheppard and Jeffrey MacDonald, got rivers more ink than any Mafioso who was caught. We expect gangsters to maim and kill. When people from the mainstream establishment do it, it’s far more of a circulation boost. Does this academic, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, have any idea why gangs even exist in the first place? Is it just a ritualistic way to make bromance and male bonding more meaningful? The cultural distance between Rhein-Main, were Ludwig comes from, and the U.S. generally is further than miles or kilometers can describe. Before reading this, who knew that the war in Ukraine is really just a conflict between people who happen to be in countries?
Whatever you think of Gladwell’s treatment, it’s hard to beat the comic relief. At one point the article maintains the incident might have been averted by calming talk. Maybe, if the one doing the talking looked formidable to Jeremy Brown. At another, we hear that without the gun on hand deadly bloodshed would have resulted in fisticuffs. Sure, a 14-year-old boy up against The Knock-Out King is a fair match to a Neumanized Eustace Tilley. The gun was probably procured because Brown’s type was not uncommon enough in the neighborhood.
The article suggests environmental improvements and maintenance can help cut down on the body count. Possibly, but that is small comfort when confronted by people with codes of honor and decorum that senselessly threaten other people’s safety. Society can only be protected from subjects prone to wanton violence by the presence of capable authority. Brown doubtless slipped through cracks many times before a kid settled things. A man capable of delivering a full force punch, or even a pulled one, on a woman over such a trifle did not belong on any street.
Ludwig cites FBI stats that “concluded that only 23 per cent of all murders [over 20 years] were instrumental.” By “instrumental” he means planned, so-called rational murders. “77 per cent … were some form of expressive violence.” Culture, of course, colors most expression. The toleration in certain cultures of everyday rage and casual physical altercations, has no threshold.
Culture Matters
When hollering at strangers is a norm and abandoning civil discourse is condoned, human interaction is apt to become amped up, rowdy and hostile. In such environments, some individuals will draw their own lines of appropriate behavior. Dismissing breaches of civility as “culture” is what is putting people in the ground.
In the 2012 Trayvon Martin incident CNN reported:
Zimmerman said he was heading back to the vehicle when Martin jumped out, asking him, “What the f***’s your problem?”
He said he told Martin, “I don’t have a problem,” but the youth replied, “Now you have a problem,” and attacked him. He said he fell backward after being punched in the nose, and “he was whaling on my head.”
A woman writing for Slate found this exchange “implausible.” It’d be interesting to find out how many fights she had seen or been in. It sounds exactly like things I’ve heard before fists flew, more than once. It would be shameful to assail Gladwell for coming out of a decorously peace-loving background. But it hardly qualifies him to write with such certainty about violence.
In 1939 after the invasion of Poland, Senator William Borah (R-Idaho) said: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler — all this might have been averted.” Gladwell and Ludwig believe if they could only fine tune social engineering, maniacal bullies will be pacified.
What they misunderstand is that dangerous felons only understand overwhelming physical subjugation. Handcuffs, hands on cops, a few years behind iron bars, and a no nonsense judge would have vastly improved Brown’s chances of long-term survival.
READ MORE from Tim Hartnett:
Remember the College Treachery
, 2025-11-23 03:25:00, 
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