John Woodrow Cox

One could easily argue that my rating for this book is unnecessarily low. It does, after all, cover a great many significant points regarding gun violence in America and the dramatic impact of that violence on children. The book is essentially an extension of a body of work that led to the author being a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Feature Writing in 2018. Indeed, the emotional toll the early part of this book took upon me -- and I strongly suspect most readers -- is overwhelming. If you've show more been hiding under a rock and been paying little or no attention to the myriad of school shootings, or have yet to come across the multiple news stories about children killing themselves or others in "accidental" gun discharges in or around homes, then this book will be a huge surprise to you. But the author seems to feel that even those of us who have read or heard the news stories, should be paying much more attention than we have, to those children who did not die in those events. The problems I have with the book is that (1) it doesn't create a cohesive approach to the points it admittedly does end up making (it bounces from one aspect to another), and (2) it seems at a loss to tell us where to go from here to address the problems pointed out, other than to say we need to think about them a lot more. The author might claim he does offer solutions, but those are really little more than bullet points, such as "Let's do universal background checks," without coming close to acknowledging how and why the gun-centric culture in America sees even that as a potential avenue to taking away the one thing in life that they see saving them from their worst fear about government. Telling the government you want a gun, no matter how responsible and competent one may be to operate one, can mean the eventual path to taking that gun away. The fact that the gun owned by that person can be melted into a blob and the person using it literally vaporized into a mist, by a nuclear weapon held by the government they fear, seems to not deter that fearful gun owner of thinking they may be able to shoot down the nuclear bomb heading their way. Read the book or not. Love guns or not. Apply logic to it all or not. Nobody is holding a gun to your head to choose one over the other. show less