The American Way of Killing by Malcolm Gladwell review – wide of the mark

Gladwell’s highly readable investigation into US gun culture fails to engage with the bigger questions

Once, while having a steak dinner with Republicans in a small town in Indiana, the man sitting opposite me asked: “How do you cope in London, when Muslims elected that mayor and you have all that gun control?” I’d been in enough such situations to know that there was no “winning” a conversation that starts like this and so did my best to playfully bat the question away.

“Well, the Muslims didn’t elect a mayor – Londoners elected a Muslim mayor,” I said. “And we don’t talk much about gun control for the same reason we don’t talk about polar bear control: we don’t have many polar bears and we don’t have many guns.”