Washington Post journalist John Woodrow Cox’s Children Under Fire lays bare the human cost of things that cannot be counted when it comes to children and gun violence.
Cox investigates the effectiveness of gun safety reforms as well as efforts to manage children’s trauma in the wake of neighborhood shootings and campus massacres.
Gary Younge said in a review for The New York Times: “Statistics on this issue have become so familiar that many Americans have become numb to the society they describe.”
The review added: “On average, one child is shot every hour; over the past decade roughly 30,000 children and teenagers have been killed by gunfire — recently eclipsing cancer as their second-leading cause of death. (Unintentional injuries, such as those caused by burns, falls or drowning, are the leading cause.)“
Opting to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, Cox “draws a painful, critical picture of what a society with virtually unfettered access to lethal weapons looks like through children’s eyes instead of lecturing the reader on politics and policy.”
