Life on a hair trigger

A world of violence sustains itself through guns, poverty and other social ills, but also through the minds it creates

Chicago, Illinois, US, 25 December 2021. Photo by Cheney Orr/Reuters

is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy in Washington, DC, where she researches how guns, gangs and violence shape life in US cities.

The day before we spoke, King1, 26, had learned that his friend Lamont had been killed. He was at home when his cousin called to break the news and asked him to come over. ‘I’m on my way,’ King replied immediately, knowing what was being asked of him. He ran up to his room to retrieve his Glock, opened his box of bullets and, one by one, filled the clip.

Lamont was dead, though King couldn’t fully wrap his mind around the fact. He’d seen him only hours earlier, when Lamont and King’s cousin stopped by his house. They’d been shot at by their rivals the day before, and King had warned them to be careful: ‘Y’all need to keep y’alls’ heads up.’ Now the car Lamont died in sat empty on a nearby street, shot up and stained with his blood. King watched a video posted on Facebook of paramedics draping the body with a sheet and carrying it into an ambulance.

King knew what came next. He and his cousin would go out with their guns and ride through the neighbourhood until they found the men responsible. ‘I just wanted my get-back,’ he said. He wanted the people who killed Lamont to feel what he was feeling. And if he couldn’t find them, he’d find someone else he had beef with. King reasoned: ‘It could be a person who I don’t like or who I’m already into it with. I’m going to slide on them too and whoever else. That’s how I grew up with my feelings. That’s how I let off my rage.’

To King, retaliation felt less like a choice than an inevitability. ‘Whether I do it or not, somebody going to do it,’ he said. ‘If it ain’t me, I got other homies who feel the same way I feel. I got cousins, family members, they mommas. That’s how it be, and that’s how it’s going to always be. It’s a repeated cycle.’

His clip was full. Then King decided to do something that a year earlier he would not have done.

For King, and for many Americans like him, gun violence is not an exceptional event but a fact of life. In some parts of the United States, lethal violence has reached a scale exceeding recent wars and military occupations. Between 2020 and 2021, a young man in Chicago’s Garfield Park neighbourhood, where King is from, faced a higher risk of being killed than a US soldier deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq. By age 40, around half of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents will have witnessed someone being shot.

Violent crime has fallen steeply across the US since 2021, though not everywhere. According to Chicago’s crime dashboard, fatal shootings in Chicago were up 7 per cent this year as of late September. But even in cities where the decline has held, a citywide figure is a poor description of how violence is experienced. In US cities, most shootings concentrate in a few dozen blocks and among a few hundred people who account for less than 1 per cent of a city’s population. Thus, citywide numbers cannot capture what it is like to live inside that zone, where violence is not a discrete event but an experience that leaves stubborn traces on many lives.

In 2022, I was part of a research team that interviewed 99 men from Chicago’s highest-violence neighbourhoods. All were former or current participants in the Rapid Employment and Development Initiative, or READI Chicago, a community violence intervention run by a partnership of Heartland Alliance, the University of Chicago and seven nonprofit organisations on the city’s south and west sides. READI served adult men at greatest risk of shooting someone or being shot. By the time they entered the programme, 98 per cent had been arrested, averaging more than 17 times each, and 35 per cent had been shot. For 18 months, participants were paid to work and attend group cognitive behavioural intervention (CBI) sessions. Outreach workers helped them navigate housing, legal, safety and substance-use crises that might otherwise have made steady participation difficult.

The men had learned to anticipate danger in ordinary moments and to meet it by fighting back

We asked each person we spoke with to tell us the story of his life, then to reconstruct minor confrontations, conflicts averted, and those that escalated into violence. We asked what they had been thinking and feeling as these events unfolded, returning to a single question: ‘What was going through your mind when that happened?’ Our aim was to access a layer of cognition beneath the behaviour, and to understand how the men made sense of their own actions and those of others.

Our conversations revealed something important about what violence teaches the mind. Lives spent amid violence meant the men had learned to anticipate danger in ordinary moments and to meet it by fighting back. The premise of READI’s work, and our research, is that because this way of seeing was learned, it could also be unlearned.

The danger these men read into the world is real; recall that more than a third of them had been shot. The difficulty is that a mind shaped by real danger does not confine its lessons to dangerous situations. It brings them into ambiguous ones, where the reading is wrong often enough to produce the very danger it anticipates. The outer world and the inner one are not separate. A world of violence sustains itself not only through guns, poverty and other social ills, but also through the ways of seeing it produces. Our research asks where these patterns of seeing and responding come from, why they persist, and how they can change.

Again and again, three patterns surfaced that could make future violence more likely.

The first was misreading situations. A great deal of violence, the men told us, stems from misconstruing some aspect of an interpersonal interaction, such as the nature of the situation or the other person’s intent. Past experiences of violence had created threat-oriented frames that quickly registered ambiguous cues as dangerous. Nuke, 24, told us that even a stranger looking at him for too long could escalate into a confrontation: ‘Sometimes I’ll react. Like: “Man, what the fuck is you looking at?”’

Tim, now 30, traced this reactive impulse to being shot and nearly killed at 17. ‘I was young in the streets, so I was always an impulsive person,’ he recalled. ‘But it got........

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