I WEEP FOR A NATION WHERE GUNS CALL THE SHOTS

Another Day In The Death Of America

It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the horrifying scale of gun violence in America. Each year, more than 100,000 people are hit by gunfire, of whom at least 32,000 die, victims of myriad types of murders, accidents and suicides.

That means 85 people a DAY lose their lives to firearms, and nobody does a damn thing to stop it.

Even President Obama, who vowed to make new gun control laws his No 1 priority after the appalling Sandy Hook massacre, has achieved precisely nothing.

There’s a mind-boggling hypocrisy to the way America treats guns in comparison to other forms of health hazard.

For example, you can’t buy a Kinder Surprise chocolate egg anywhere in the US – they are banned on the grounds that the toys contained inside present too great a threat to children. Yet there are 2,300 different types of gun legally available.

This obviously makes no sense, but try telling an American that and they will simply refer you to the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

‘I don’t have an inalienable right to a Kinder Surprise egg, but I do to a gun,’ an American friend once explained to me. He was serious.

The worst casualties of this madness are America’s children. More than 500 kids a year are slaughtered by guns.

Journalist Gary Younge selects just one day to illustrate the horror: Saturday, November 23, 2013. A day in which ten children and teens were shot dead across the United States. They were white, black and Latino; they died in suburbs, hamlets and ghettos. The youngest was nine, the oldest 19. None of the deaths made national news yet each in its own way was harrowing.

The nine-year-old, Jaiden Dixon, opened the door of his Ohio home and was shot in the head by his mother’s ex-boyfriend. An 11-yearold boy, Tyler Dunn, was killed by his friend at a sleepover in Michigan. An 18-year-old gang member, Tyshon Anderson, was gunned down on a stairwell in Chicago.

Each of the ten youngsters gets their own chapter. Younge finds out who they were, why their lives matter, and what each death tells us about American society and its virtual surrender to gun violence.

It’s an evocative, powerful, well-written book that puts a human face – young human faces – to the shocking toll of largely unreported gun fatalities. It made me angry, sad, despairing and, on occasion, tearful.

How can you not weep for so many young lives senselessly snuffed out on a daily basis simply because America values the right to have a gun over the right to not be shot dead by one? For in the end, that’s what the gun debate boils down to.

It wasn’t even a particularly bad day by America’s standards. Just a normal day of sickening atrocity that ended with ten young people, riddled with bullets, on mortuary slabs.

I’d like to think Younge’s book will snap America into some kind of action but sadly, it won’t. If 20 first-graders can be annihilated in their classrooms and not a single gun law be changed, a book about ten killings none of us had ever heard about will barely raise a bored shrug –America has become horribly immune to gun death.