The premise of Gary Younge’s new book Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (which will be released on October 4 by Nation Books) is both very simple and very chilling: on any given day, on average, seven children age 19 and younger will be shot to death somewhere in this country. Younge chose a random date, November 23, 2013, and set out to find all the kids who died from gunshots that day and document their lives.
There were a few variations from expectations. None was killed by a cop. None was a suicide. (Those, Younge says, are usually not reported.) And though two of the deaths were the result of kids playing with guns, none involved a toddler. (On average, there is one toddler-related shooting every week.) “But part of the power of the concept,” Younge notes, “is that you kind of take what you get, and that it’s a day.”
The ten boys who were shot on November 23, 2013, lived in all regions of the country, from Newark to San Jose. The families of two of them, 19-year-old Kenneth Mills-Tucker and 18-year-old Pedro Dado Cortez, declined to speak to Younge, but the rest welcomed the chance to talk about their lost children.
“I had in this book kids who I knew as much as I could about, and therefore could act almost as proxies for other kids that I didn’t know anything about,” Younge says. “What I hope is that the book enables some empathy, that these are kids like your kids. These aren’t some other species of child. There’s nothing defective about these children. There’s something defective about a society that makes them vulnerable to this kind of death.”
