by Gary Younge
“Where did you get my number from?” he asked. I explained again. “How did you get their number?” he asked. I explained. “How did you find our names?” he asked. I explained. And so it went on. Understandably, he couldn’t see past being blindsided. I apologized for putting him on the spot and asked if we could talk at a better time. He said he’d call me back that night.
I immediately texted an apology and a further explanation of the project. He didn’t call back that night. Nor the night after that. I left it for a couple of days and texted again and then once again before I left for Indianapolis. He never called back. When I arrived in Indianapolis five months later, I called the grandfather’s house and left a message. When they didn’t get back to me, I went to their home and left a note at their door. By the time I got back to the hotel, they’d left a voicemail while I was driving. It was his grandfather’s partner. The message was four seconds long. She simply repeated her number and said, “Don’t call again.”
I’D GONE TO INDIANAPOLIS in April 2014, almost exactly five months after Kenneth’s death, for the annual convention of the National Rifle Association, which was being held in the downtown convention center, just twenty minutes away from where he was shot. The sense of fear and helplessness exhibited in those 911 calls the night Kenneth died—the infantilized man unable to defend his family and seeking protection from the state; domestic cocoons pierced by the chaos of the street; law-abiding citizens paralyzed by vagabonds run wild—is the currency in which the NRA trades. The 911 dispatcher instructed the caller to sit and wait; the slogan for the NRA convention that year was “Stand and fight.”
When the NRA comes to town, they make their presence felt. A huge banner straddling an entire block of the city center promised “Nine Acres of Guns and Gear.” The displays inside didn’t disappoint. In a cavernous exhibition hall showcasing the industry’s finest killing machines, scores of white men (few other demographics were present) aimed empty barrels into the middle distance and pondered their purchases. All the big names were there: Mossberg (“Built rugged. Proudly American”); Smith & Wesson (“Advanced by design”); and Henry (“Made in America. Or not made at all”).
The relationship some of the men walking these halls have with guns is romantic. At times it even borders on the sexual. The touch, smell, and power of a firearm come together in their own erotic alchemy. “Pick up a rifle, a pistol, a shotgun, and you’re handling a piece of American history,” writes Chris Kyle in American Gun. “Take the gun up now, and the smell of black powder and saltpeter sting the air. Raise the rifle to your shoulder and look into the distance. You see not a target but a whole continent of potential, of great things to come, a promising future . . . but also toil, trial, and hardship. The firearm in your hands is a tool to help you through it.”3
The convention hosts scores of seminars ranging from “Wild Game Cooking: From Field to Table” to “The Men and Guns of D-Day.” But by far the most popular are those premised on the notion that you are fighting for your life. In the “Home Defense Concepts” seminar, Rob Pincus, a taut, muscular figure with a trimmed goatee, encouraged several hundred attendees to visualize the room in their house where they would barricade themselves in the event of a burglary and to “re-create that emotional component” of a break-in by having a dry run with the whole family. Families should have a code word. “Think about where you are in the morning and in the evening,” he told them as they imagined the best hiding place. Running through the arsenal that might be most appropriate, he suggested a 20 gauge for defense, or maybe a 9mm, “which can be a lot more manageable.” When thinking of the firearm you’d use, bear the following in mind: “What’s the practical distance? What’s the predictable distance? What’s the predictable size? What are the shooting skills?”
In other words, imagine a burglary in vivid detail, and then make sure you are always prepared for that eventuality. Rather than succumb to the complacency that it would not happen or is unlikely to happen, develop a state of alertness in which you have embodied and embedded the notion that it could happen to you at any moment, and develop the reflexes to respond effectively and accordingly. Basically, live your life in fear of threat and violation. Be stimulated by the possibility that someone, somewhere might be poised to invade and attack. “You have to do the drill,” he stressed. “You have to create the stimulus.”
But the threat the NRA evokes is not only to an individual or even a family; it is to American civilization itself. “In order to justify the necessity for firearms, the gun-rights narrative must continually reaffirm the frontier spirit, which makes self-defense essential and militia duty compulsory,” writes James Welch, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, in his essay “The Ethos of the Gun.” “Despite the fact that the frontier has long ceased to be a common experience for Americans, the staunchest gun advocates go to great pains to maintain a sense of the world as a dangerous, insecure place.”4
The NRA defends the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Adopted in 1791, it states, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The assumption that this relates to an individual’s rights is widespread but by no means uncontested.
“The world of the Second Amendment is unrecognizable,” argues Michael Waldman in The Second Amendment: A Biography. “A world where every white American man served in the military for his entire adult life, where those citizen soldiers bought their own military weapons and stored them at home, and where the idea of a US Army would be enough to send patriots to grab their musket. When the militias evaporated, so did the original meaning of the Second Amendment.”5
Five years after his retirement from the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Nixon, insisted that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”6
Back at the convention the NRA’s executive vice president and CEO, Wayne LaPierre, addressed a huge rally by painting a dark picture of hydra-headed threats enveloping the country, leaving no person safe and no place uncontaminated by suspicion. “We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and carjackers and knockout gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all. I ask you: Do you trust this government to protect you? We are on our own.”7
Apocalyptic in tone, demagogic in content, hyperbolic in scale, the dystopian vision conjured by LaPierre was of a nation not only under attack but in decline. “Almost everywhere you look,” he said, “something has gone wrong. You feel it in your heart, you know it in your gut. Something has gone wrong. The core values we believe in, the things we care about most, are changing. Eroding. . . . It’s why more and more Americans are buying firearms and ammunition. Not to cause trouble, but because we sense that America is already in trouble.”8
EVERY NRA CONVENTION ATTRACTS a small but determined gathering of protesters from around the country. But this one was special. A few weeks earlier, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg had announced he would spend $50 million developing a grassroots network of gun control advocates that would bring together some of the main organizations campaigning on the issue, including Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, to form a group called “Everytown for Gun Safety.”9 Its press conference in Indianapolis that day to protest the NRA convention was one of the first events it had ever held.
Given the initial reaction of Kenneth’s grandfather’s partner and the fact that the NRA convention was in his hometown, I hoped that I might find Kenneth’s friends or relat
ives among the gun control activists, galvanized by his death. Looking around the room at the press conference, that seemed unlikely. In a city where one in four people is African American, and more than half the homicide victims are black, there were precious few black people among the protesters—apart from a handful of women at the podium, all from other cities, who had lost their sons to gun violence. Indeed, despite Indianapolis having one of the highest homicide rates of any of the cities covered in this book, there didn’t seem to be anyone from the city there who had suffered from gun violence.
When I asked one of the organizers if I could talk to a local person, I was steered toward a woman from Carmel, a nearby wealthy suburb. Like most attendees at the convention, she became involved in gun control after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. If others I spoke to said they had been active on the issue before, they told me that this particular tragedy had reignited their passion. If they admitted they’d never paid it much attention before, then Newtown forced them to reckon with their ambivalence. Given the large number of mass shootings—in 2013 alone there were 254, including one on the day this book is set and four in Indianapolis10—what was it specifically about Sandy Hook that had prompted her to act?
“I have four little kids,” she said. “When that happened I couldn’t help thinking about my little kids in school. I’d been growing increasingly more concerned. Every time a shooting happened I thought, ‘Oh my God.’ But I didn’t really know how serious it was. Few circumstances are as great as a mom trying to protect her children.”
Donna Dees-Thomases, who organized the Million Mom March in 2000 (the biggest protest in favor of gun control to date), spelled it out when I met her at the press conference: “It was first graders. Twenty-six Americans were slaughtered in an elementary school in five minutes. That could have been our school. They could have been our children. It’s the innocence of children. It isn’t any more terrible than when anyone else dies a gun death. But you can’t deny the devastation of these innocent first graders, and we didn’t protect them.” All around the room the children who died at Sandy Hook were invariably described as “angels,” “innocents,” or “babies.”
This emotional connection is easy to understand. The enduring image of that day, of distraught children being escorted by a police officer in an orderly line, their faces contorted with panic and trauma, was searing. The sight of parents waiting anxiously to learn the fate of their kids and the pen portraits of fledgling lives so senselessly destroyed were harrowing. It is also easy to grasp the potential political impact of the moment. If Sandy Hook was a tragedy, it was also an opportunity for gun control advocates to illustrate their case in the starkest terms. Rights come with responsibilities; all freedoms come with some restrictions. Do you love guns more than you love children? How does the freedom to bear arms measure up against the freedom to know that your children will be safe in elementary school?
On the same day, in China, Min Yongjun, a mentally ill thirty-six-year-old, took a knife into Chenpeng primary school in Henan province and stabbed twenty-three children and an elderly woman.11 No one died. Whatever one makes of the NRA axiom that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” it couldn’t be clearer that people can kill more people more efficiently with guns than with almost anything else that is commercially available in the United States.
In law, as in life, children comprise a special category: the most vulnerable and the most in need of protection, both by and from their parents and the state. The fact that they are children means they have had no say in how the world they live in has been constructed or what the ground rules are. There is pathos in their pain and thus more intense outrage at those who would torment or harm them. To raise this in an argument does not exploit an issue but contextualizes it.
But dwelling on children can be calculated. In not only emphasizing their vulnerability but also declaring their inherent innocence and insisting upon their angelic nature, one moves them from a “protected” to an elevated category: it shifts the emphasis from the availability of guns to the moral purity of those they might be used to kill. Dees-Thomases was right when she insisted, “It isn’t any more terrible than when anyone else dies a gun death.” And yet to dwell on the innocence of “babes” and “angels” suggests there are more guilty, less angelic victims out there more deserving of the fate. The pursuit and promotion of the “ideal, worthy victim” is a staple for social justice campaigns. It can at times be effective. But it is always problematic.
In 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was fished out of Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River with a bullet in his skull, an eye gouged out, and his forehead crushed on one side after he failed to show “due respect” to a white woman in a grocery store. The two white men who killed him (they later confessed to a journalist) were acquitted by an all-white jury. In an editorial, Life magazine drew attention to the fact that Till’s father, Louis, had died in the military during the Second World War: “[Emmett Till] had only his life to lose, and many others have done that, including his soldier-father who was killed in France fighting for the American proposition that all men are equal.”12 This attempt to sanctify Emmett as the offspring of a patriotic serviceman backfired when it turned out that Louis had actually been hung in Italy after he was convicted of raping two Italian women and killing a third—an accusation he denied. But if Louis had been caught, on camera, diving on a hand grenade to save his platoon, it would still have been irrelevant to Till’s fate. No child should have been so brutally slain whether his or her father was a pimp or a priest.
Not all attempts to establish the decency of a victim are executed in such a ham-fisted manner, but they are all underpinned by the same fundamental flaw. The argument’s center of gravity shifts from “This shouldn’t happen to anyone” to “This shouldn’t happen to people like this,” suggesting that there are people out there who might deserve it. Emphasizing the innocence of the child victims of Sandy Hook may clarify the obscenity of the injustice of young people being shot, but that doesn’t make the injustice less obscene when it happens to someone who has lived long enough to be deemed guilty of something. When you take these empathetic shortcuts, a lot of people get left out on the way.
KENNETH MILLS-TUCKER WAS GUILTY of something. With his family being unforthcoming, I trawled the Internet to find out what I could about him, including examining public records such as police files. It was there I discovered that on March 10, 2013, at around 11:50 p.m., he was guilty of driving while black. Or, more specifically, of slowing down but “failing to come to a full and complete stop” while approaching a stop sign. In the incident report, the officer who pulled him over writes, “When I got out and approached the vehicle, I smelled the distinct odor of what, through my training and experience as a law enforcement officer, I believed to be marijuana. When I got to the driver’s side window, a large billow of smoke rolled out of the window, which again smelled of marijuana.” He took Kenneth’s license and registration, went back to his car, ran Kenneth’s details through the system, and called for a backup unit. When the other officer arrived, he ordered both Kenneth and the other passenger out of the car and “placed them in handcuffs for our safety and due to the probable cause of the odor of marijuana.”
Searching the vehicle, the officer found a pipe with marijuana residue in it just above the pull-out cup holders, as well as several cigarillo wrappers and loose tobacco. Kenneth said it was his pipe. He was arrested for “possession of paraphernalia” and given a citation for failing to stop at a stop sign. The car was towed, the pipe was confiscated, and Kenneth was dropped off at police headquarters.
This is how large numbers of black men in the United States are caught in the criminal justice system—with a dragnet. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander explains that 95 percent of “Pipeline” stops yield no illegal drugs.13 (Operation Pipeline trains uniformed officers to identify indicators of
drug-related illegal activity while engaged in traffic-enforcement operations.) This was one of them. But once they’ve stopped you for “something” they’ll settle for anything. In the words 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.”14
Kenneth’s pipe made him a prince that night. Though he was killed nine days before he was due in court, one can assume—given that it apparently was his pipe and the likelihood of his affording a good lawyer was probably remote (he’d been assigned a public defender)—that he would have been convicted of “something.” This would have cast him out of the world of “babes” and “angels.”
To a sympathetic eye, it wouldn’t take much imagination to cast Kenneth as a success story. In a city where 38 percent of black kids did not graduate from high school in 2012,15 he was, according to his obituary, a graduate of Arsenal Technical High School.16 In a city where 74 percent of black youth between ages sixteen and nineteen were not working (many, of course, were still in school),17 Kenneth had a job at U-Haul. But, most significantly, he was loved. “K.J. was like a Son to us all,” wrote one family friend on his online obituary page. “I always enjoyed watching him in church. . . . You always had them dressed so well, and they were so well mannered, and I enjoyed looking into his bright eyes.”
But had Kenneth’s death been an issue of public concern, all of this would likely have counted for nothing. No media account could or would include the phrase “never been in trouble with the law”; most would be sure to mention his “recent drug-related conviction.” No longer innocent, no longer worthy. On some level it would be framed as though he had it coming.
As it happens, the handful of stories about the incident said nothing about Kenneth beyond his age and name. The circumstances surrounding his death earned a couple of hundred words; the fact of his death earned scarcely more than a sentence; to his life was devoted nary a word. But had anyone considered it worth denigrating him, they wouldn’t have needed to trawl through his police records. They could just go through his Twitter feed and let him condemn himself. For although dead men tell no tales, many younger ones (including all the teens who died that day) do now have a voice beyond the grave—on social media.