Another Day in the Death of America

A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives

By Gary Younge





In 2013, between the wee hours of Nov. 23 and the wee hours of Nov. 24, 10 American children and teenagers were killed by guns. The youngest, Jaiden Dixon, was 9, shot by the deranged father of his eldest brother. The oldest, Kenneth Mills-Tucker, was 19, shot in a car under circumstances that are still unclear.

The number of fatalities that day exceeded the national daily average of 6.75. Then again, averages are almost always misleading — murders of this kind tend to peak on weekends, and Nov. 23 fell on a Saturday that year. The victims, all boys, were also disproportionately African-American (seven). Then again, there’s always been an appalling lopsidedness to this demographic. That day was simply worse.

Those 24 hours, extraordinary in two senses — extra ordinary and beyond ordinary, banal in the context of our national normal but outrageous by any civilized measure — are now the subject of a book by Gary Younge: “Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives.” It is exactingly argued, fluidly written and extremely upsetting. This is your country on guns.

Mr. Younge devotes one chapter to each child. No two were alike, and neither were their murders.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/books/review-another-day-in-the-death-of-america-on-guns-killing-children.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well