A New Book on Children and Guns.

By the time I had read a few pages of John Cox’s Children Under Fire, An American Crisis, I knew I had to read the whole book. Why? Because the book opens with the description of a shooting in the Southeast neighborhood across the Anacostia River from downtown D.C., which is now an underserved, violence-ridden, overwhelmingly Black ghetto. But I happen to have spent the first five years of my life in that neighborhood.

That’s right. From 1944 until 1950, me, my older brother and my parents lived in an apartment on Hillside Road just off Benning Road, about a mile away from where six people were shot in one week, of which the last one killed was the father of seven-year-old Tyshaun McPhatter whose experiences become the initial content of this book.

The young boy’s experiences and the experiences of other children who are connected in some way to acts of gun violence also form the basic argument of this book’s narrative, which is that we underestimate the damage caused by guns to the young population, which then produces a seemingly unstoppable cycle of violence over which we exercise little, if any control.

As long as the author stays focused on the lives of children who are either victims of gun violence or experience it as seeing it damage or kill family and friends, the book reads as a genuinely moving and emotional perspective on an…