Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives

FEATURING GARY YOUNGE – Gun violence in the United States is one of those issues that we seem to have thrown up our collective hands in despair at. No matter how high the death toll, conservative gun proliferation activists insist that their right to buy and own guns trumps our right to live in safety. And they have the political power to keep it that way. Only when mass shootings shed light on the issue in shocking ways do we pay attention to the scourge of gun violence. But shootings happen every single day in the US and most of them are barely noticed except by the people directly impacted. To non-Americans like my guest today, US gun culture is utterly perplexing.

Award winning writer for the Guardian and Nation, Gary Younge, has taken on the challenge of humanizing the daily toll from guns in his new book. The premise is that he picked a single day, November 23, 2013, and shared the stories of ten different American boys who died in separate incidents around the country on that day.

Gary Younge, Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, award winning columnist for the Guardian and Nation. He won the Foreign Commentator of the Year award in Britain and the David Nyhan Prize for political journalism by Harvard’s Shorenstein’s Center in 2015. His earlier books include Who Are We?, And Should it Matter in the 21st century, Stranger in a Strange Land, Travels in the Disunited States and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s Journey Through the Deep South. He now joins me to discuss his latest book, Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives.