Malcolm Gladwell wants to change the conversation about America’s gun violence 

For bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, the distance between the Canada where he grew up and America where he now lives can be measured in a skill no child should have to learn — how to stabilize a gunshot wound.

In the introduction to his new book, The American Way of Killing: The Invention Of An Epidemic, Gladwell describes a doctor in a Chicago neighbourhood who has lost many people close to him to gun violence. During his time off, the doctor visits elementary schools to teach fourth-graders how to respond to a shooting injury.

“This does not happen anywhere else in the developed world. I want to figure out why,” Gladwell, who grew up in rural Elmira, Ont., writes in the book.

Gladwell, a Canadian citizen, will discuss the book with CBC The Early Edition’s Stephen Quinn at the Vancouver Playhouse on Nov. 24, in a sold-out Vancouver Writers Fest event.

“It helps to have an outsider’s perspective to appreciate how peculiar and unusual America is,” Gladwell told Postmedia from his home in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Drawing on extensive interviews, archival and social science research, the author of the bestsellers The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers, challenges readers and his own preconceptions of ideas surrounding gun violence in the U.S.

“Here I was someone who has been writing about this issue for years. I felt like I was reasonably knowledgeable, and yet I realized as I dug into it that a lot of my ideas were just simply false,” said Gladwell.

Working on episodes of his podcast, Revisionist History, helped draw him deeper into the subject.

“I just feel like there is so much that we can learn about who we are and the world that we’ve constructed for ourselves by studying problems. By studying extreme examples of human behaviour. And this is an extreme example of human behaviour,” said Gladwell.

The result is an engrossing, accessible book in three parts, examining how Americans talk about gun violence, how they misunderstand its nature, and the moral consequences of the course the country has chosen. Its approach is recognizably Gladwell’s — ideas are tested through stories about real people in particular places. Assumptions are challenged.

One of the assumptions he challenges is the idea that the U.S. is heavily policed. His research led him to argue the opposite. Compared with European countries, it is under-policed, and any calls to defund law enforcement make no sense.

To illustrate the gap between perception and the real world, he recounts an informal poll he did of 100 people. Given the number of police officers in Los Angeles, they were asked to estimate the number in Berlin, a city of a roughly comparable population of just under four million. According to Gladwell, 98 got it wrong in their thinking that L.A. had more officers. The fact is there are 8,500 officers in Los Angeles compared to 18,000 in Berlin.

For Gladwell, the misconceptions do not belong exclusively to one political camp.