Quotes from Gary Younge

Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened, "writes Leovy in Ghettoside. "Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.

But they can explain a great deal. The circumstances into which people are born and the range of opportunities to which they are exposed shape both the choices available to them and the process by which they make those choices even if they, ultimately, still make the choice. I have yet to meet anyone who denies that individuals have free will. But I also have yet to meet anyone who makes a convincing argument that circumstances don't shape what you can do with that will.

My aim here is to put a human face—a child's face—on the "collateral damage" of gun violence in America.

Herein lies one of the most tragic elements to emerge from my research: that every black parent of a teenage child I spoke to had factored in the possibility that this might happen to their kid. Indeed

To Jaden, Kenneth, Stanley, Pedro, Tyler, Edwin, Samuel, Taishan, Gerry and Justin. For who you were and who you might have been.

One should be cautious when drawing conclusions about people's characters from social media. On Facebook, nobody's children cry, nobody's marriage is imperilled, and everyone has beautiful days under the bluest of skies. These are performance platforms where we present versions of ourselves that are curated for public consumption.

Firearms are the leading source of death among black children under the age of nineteen and the second leading cause of death for all children of the same age group, after car accidents.

of one California Highway Patrol officer quoted in the book, "It's sheer numbers.… You've got to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince.

Michael Brown, the hapless director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, responded, "We're seeing people that we didn't know exist.

The development of social media, citizen journalism, and new technology has made it more difficult for the established media to simply ignore gun deaths in certain areas.

Les Américains ne sont pas plus violents par nature que n'importe quel autre peuple. Si leur société est aussi mortelle, c'est parce que les armes y sont très largement disponibles.