Steve Levit is my free economics friend and co-author. He's an economist at the University

of Chicago. One topic that he's studied for years from a lot of angles is crime. He's

tried to figure out which of many potential factors have a big impact on crime rates.

More police and more prisons? That's a yes. The economy? Mostly a no.

The legalization of abortion helped crime fall a generation later? That is a yes. He's also

studied guns, gun laws, gun buybacks, gun crime. Levit and I were working together in Texas

on the day back in December that a 20-year-old guy in Connecticut named Adam Lanza killed his mother

and shot up an elementary school killing 20 little kids and six adults and finally shot himself.

As horrific as that was as incomprehensibly sad, Steve Levit, given everything he knows about crime,

he wasn't all that surprised.

I think my reaction was probably different than other people's reactions because the thing

that I'm always shocked by is how few insane people are out there doing mass murders, not how many

are out there doing mass murders. I have sort of a sense of foreboding. I always expect there to be

crazy people out there doing murders and so I guess I probably wasn't as surprised as a lot of other

people. So you're more surprised when there isn't as much mayhem in the world as there is the

opportunity for mayhem to occur. Yeah, the way I think about it, when there's one or two people

out there a year who just go completely nuts and kill a bunch of people, then you think, well,

why is it only one or two? Why is it not eight or ten or fifteen or twenty? Once you get that far

out in the tail, it seems striking that there are, you know, we know there are lots of people who are

insane. We certainly know there are lots of guns and that's a lethal combination.

From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores

the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner.

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