Every day, on average, seven children and teenagers are shot dead in the United States. November 23, 2013 — the day Gary Younge chose randomly as the setting for his book Another Day in the Death of America — was “just another day in America.”
On that Saturday, he writes, “as befits an unremarkable Saturday in America,” 10 children and teens were killed by guns. On that particular day, all the victims were boys; seven were black, two Latinos, and one white. The youngest was nine, the oldest 19; their average age was 14.7. But as Younge notes, they were not all the children and teens killed by guns on that day — they were the ones he could find, scouring local news sites for stories that sometimes fell short of a hundred words. [...]
While the book tells the neglected stories of these children’s lives and deaths, it also paints a brutal picture of their settings. The result is a story that’s not so much about gun violence as it is about America’s resignation and indifference to guns, violence, and a complex web of other tragedies: racial segregation, institutional failure, social precariousness, and poverty. [...]
Set less than a year after the Sandy Hook shooting, when a lone gunman killed six adults and 20 small children at a Connecticut elementary school, the book aims to capture the dissonance between Americans’ obsession with the all-too-regular spectacle of mass shootings and the “national shrug” with which the relentless stream of gun deaths is met every day. Yet the book is not polemical in the way gun debates often are; it is more simply and powerfully a quiet collection of stories. As Younge writes, “It is not a book about gun control,” though “it is a book made possible by the absence of gun control.” [...]
The gun control movement has two challenges. The first is to try to find a way to connect to the people who are most routinely and regularly affected by gun violence — and those are low-income people of color. The inability to connect with them mirrors a lack of urgency within that movement. One of the problems is that while large numbers of people support, for instance, background checks, they’re very unlikely to make it a priority in their voting. And that’s unlike the gun lobby: They think it’s urgent, they think it’s really important. But the people who are most affected by gun violence aren’t the people who are genuinely reached by the gun control movement. [...]
Also, what I did find out by reading quite a lot about Dallas is that this segregation didn’t happen by accident: Dallas was made like that. For 200 years, America was a slave state, for 100 years it was an apartheid state, and for 50 years it’s been a non-racial democracy. So you can see where that comes from: this non-racial democracy is actually a relatively recent thing for America. I covered the election from Muncie, Indiana. There’s an old map of Muncie that shows how it was segregated between the wealthy area, and the white working class area, and the black area, or the ‘Negro section,’ as it was called. And it’s exactly the same now. Nothing has changed.
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