April 2025

Jens Ludwig: Yeah, let me start off by acknowledging the first part of the question, which the data suggests, is very true, that the 400 million guns that the United States has for a country of 330 million people is without question part of the story. You know, we have state level data on a proxy for household gun ownership. And we can see that over a decades-long period, the household gun ownership rate between the northern part of the United States the southern part of the United States have been converging over time, and we can see over that same time period that murder rates have been converging across these regions as well. So it’s a nice sort of natural experiment that points to something that’s suggestive of a causal relationship between overall gun availability and murders. And so, if you had a wand that one could wave, that would get rid of the 400 million guns in the United States, I think it is very much true that the United States would become much, much safer. But as you say, that’s not the whole story.

David Edmonds: America is not the only country awash with guns. My elder brother lives in Switzerland, where almost everybody has a gun, but they don’t have the murder rate that you have. So it seems like guns alone can’t be the answer.

Jens Ludwig: Yeah, gun violence is really the product of two things, not just one thing. My little cartoon equation for this in the book is gun violence equals guns plus violence. What you can see in the data is that, for instance, that Switzerland and Canada have almost identical levels of gun ownership, and yet, the murder rate in Canada is multiple times what you see in Switzerland. And I think the explanation there is that the rate of violent crime is substantially different between Switzerland and Canada. And so I think what the data seemed to suggest is that guns don’t cause violent behavior, cause violent crime. Guns make the violence that happens much more deadly. So you can have lots of guns and not many murders, lots of violent crime without guns and not many murders, but if you have lots of guns and lots of violence together, that’s the thing that leads to lots of murders.

The sad reality is that we gave him this power.

In the fall of 1976 — ironically, America’s Bicentennial year — Congress passed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, which grants the White House authority to take strong economic measures against foreign nations without either an investigation or seeking prior approval from Congress. Like a lot of laws passed in the years immediately after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Congress thought that IEEPA was a way to reign in an imperial president, when in reality it did the exact opposite.

The idea behind the law was to end a raft of ongoing emergencies declared by Nixon and other past presidents and create a better-spelled-out, more democratic process for any future ones. Instead, the declaration of national emergencies has expanded under every president, Democrat or Republican, over high-profile events like the 1979 Iran hostage crisis or the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

In the bigger picture, Americans have become way too numb to sweeping uses and, arguably, abuses of presidential powers, whether that’s dropping bombs on Yemen with little more debate than an emoji-laden Signal chat, or imposing economic sanctions or, before last Wednesday, more targeted tariffs. This development is completely the opposite of the version of America sought by its founders, who envisioned a republic in which Congress — a large deliberative body, elected by the citizenry — would have the power to declare war or levy taxes, including tariffs. […]

Even some conservatives who were presumably elated over Trump’s victory last November are appalled over his abuse of the emergency law, including the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative legal outfit supported by the likes of industrialist Charles Koch and Supreme Court influencer Leonard Leo. This week, the group filed a complaint against the president’s new tariffs. But this moment should serve as a much bigger wake-up call for how far America has gone down the wrong track.

If Congress wants to listen to the more than 1 million people in the streets — and it should, if it wants to cling to any lingering claim on legitimacy — then it should first act immediately to use the power it has under the 1970s law to reverse the taxation-without-representation of a mad king, as soon as possible. Then it should repeal IEEPA and draft new legislation that severely restricts a president’s emergency-declaration powers, since we’ve now seen how badly these can be misused and abused by a power-hungry dictator.