Trymaine Lee’s A Thousand Ways to Die traces systemic violence against Black Americans from his great-grandfather’s 1922 Sundown Town lynching to his grandfather’s 1976 murder over $160, linking generational trauma to guns-for-slaves cycles, Jim Crow laws, and modern racial disparities in justice. Callers like Lewis tie post-1960s surges in Black gun violence to white backlash against civil rights progress and the gun industry’s fear-driven sales, while Ed’s stats (48K U.S. firearm deaths vs. 6.7K in EU) underscore guns as a primary driver of early death. Lee argues that poverty, police brutality, and wealth inequality—not individual choice—force cycles of violence, demanding structural reforms to break the pattern. [Automatically generated summary]
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In so many ways, that was the starting point of what the book would become.
Until that point, I had been writing a book about the true cost of gun violence in this country in terms of actual dollars.
But once I had my heart attack, it forced me to widen the aperture on what it means to experience violence in this country and what we carry within us and how all of the violence we see and experience, especially as black people in this country, can manifest in physical ways.
And so at 38, I had this heart attack, and my then five, turning, six-year-old daughter was asking me how and why.
And so I had to be honest about what it was that was bearing down my heart.
And it had been a career of carrying bits of trauma and violence that I covered as a reporter, but also a family history that had been marked with gun violence.
And so it made sense to start there because it changed a lot for me personally, but also in the writing of the book.
So this wasn't the original name, but after the heart attack, I was wrestling with the difference between a blood clot that caused my heart attack and a bullet.
And now they are very different things, but both have the power to take an end or shred a life.
And I arrived at my blood clot in the same ways that many other people experienced the bullet from this kind of structures of American society and the history and everything that we carry.
And so it was, you know, important, I think, to kind of clarify the many ways in which we die in this country.
So there are a thousand ways a bullet is just one.
But the original idea was sparked after I met a young man back in 2003 when I was just an intern at the Philadelphia Daily News covering the police and crime beat, a young man named Kevin Johnson, who was left paralyzed after being shot during a robbery.
And I met Kevin and his family, and he just had so much hope and buoyance despite his condition.
But then I spoke to his mother about the true cost to this family, not just in Kevin's mobility, but all the myriad costs it would take just to get him out of the hospital, which meant a new wheel, a special wheelchair, a special van to transport the wheelchair, a ramp for their North Philadelphia row home, the widening of the doors just to get the wheelchair in the door, a changing of the receptacles, all of these actual costs.
And in that moment, I was thinking to myself, like, you know, I don't think people care about the Kevin Johnsons of the world, but maybe they care that we're all paying a literal cost for gun violence.
Most people who survive a gunshot, most of them don't have private insurance.
It's public insurance.
So the public, we're literally paying the price.
And so maybe that might get people's attention and force us to have the conversation about the cost we're willing to pay for this gun violence.
And so that was like the initial seed of the idea.
And then once I had my heart attack and I had to weigh again the aperture of violence, it changed everything.
And I'll just share a quote from your book about that.
It says this: Although I have been physically healthy most of my life, my heart and spirit have taken on tremendous psychic burdens.
I've spent more than 20 years as a journalist reporting on stories that led me to people who had just missed death or others who were withering from the weight of someone else's.
I've chronicled the tragedy of lives taken too soon, most often with guns.
I have traced the paths of bullets ricocheting from person to person, wreaking physical and emotional havoc long after victims are laid to rest or their scars colloid over.
That is a quote from A Thousand Ways to Die, and our guest is Tremaine Lee, the author of that book.
If you'd like to join us, if you'd like to ask a question or add to the conversation, you can go ahead and start calling in now.
Republicans are on 202-748-8001.
Democrats 202-748-8000.
And Independents 202-748-8002.
I want to ask you about guns in particular, because you talk in your book about kind of the history of guns and how it has played a role in African-American life and history.
You know, it's important for me as I was tracking back, excuse me, the ways in which the gun in particular has shaped black life in this country.
In some ways, it's the literal physical gun, the violence of the trigger and the bullet.
But it's also important to talk about the systems and structures of systemic violence that are almost requisite before you ever get to a gun being fired.
By the time you get to the gun and its impact on Black life, there's been generations of other violence.
But in doing my research and trying to understand from the very beginning how guns have shaped our American experience, we actually have to go back to Africa, which I do in the book.
I think there's this conception from a lot of us, the way we're taught about slavery, is that there were just a surplus of humans from these wars that were happening.
And Europeans came and Americans came and just wanted to take advantage of this untapped labor force, right, to handle the needs, the growing needs of labor in the Western world.
When in fact, what we see is what's known as the guns for slave cycle, in which as gun technology was rising in Europe, the powers in Europe were applying regional African powers with guns to create the war, to create the slave, to create the conditions for the slave.
And so before the first shackle feet of black people landed in what would become the United States, their bodies, their lives were bartered and sold between European powers and their African co-conspirators.
And so this notion that black people were pushed out of Africa with the muzzle of a flintlock rifle at their backs and then introduced to the Western world where there would be more men, white men with guns to maintain a system of chattel slavery for generations and generations.
And it would take guns and violence to free enslaved people, hundreds of thousands of which of those soldiers were black men with guns, only to have to fight to push back against the black codes and Jim Crow and all the violence and tumult of the lynching era and through the civil rights era to the modern day America we see today with streets flooded with guns and blood and violence.
And so the ways in which guns have certainly physically shaped black life and limited black life, while also guns in some situations used to defend and protect black life has created a dynamic that we carry with us today.
So growing up, I was always aware of my grandfather's murder back in 1976, just a couple years before I was born.
My grandparents had an apartment in Camden, New Jersey, and they went to rent it to a prospective tenant who left a deposit of $160.
And he left for many weeks.
And then he came back, won his money back.
And my grandfather told him that the deposit was non-refundable and that he would see him in court.
Instead of meeting my grandfather in court, he came back and shot and killed my grandfather.
And so growing up, I was always aware of the tremendous burden and loss of my grandfather's murder.
But it wasn't the first time someone in my family had been killed.
In researching and reporting this book, I discovered the first killing in our family was back in 1922.
My great-grandparents and my grandmother were tenant farmers in rural Jim Crow, Georgia.
And around the end of the year, my grandmother's brother, 12 years old, Cornelius, was sent off to run errands, and he was shot and killed in a neighboring Sundown town.
For those who don't know, Sundowntowns are communities where it was explicit, not necessarily in law, but in practice, that Black people couldn't be there during certain times of the day or evening.
And so this is where he was killed.
My family then joins the Great Migration after that, joining millions of other Black Americans fleeing the violence of the South to the North in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia and Baltimore and New Jersey.
And many years after they arrived, another of my grandmother's brothers, a teenager named McClinton, was shot and killed by a state trooper under very mysterious circumstances.
And then my grandfather's killing in 76.
And then in 96, I had a stepbrother who was murdered in Camden.
And so my family has experienced the many ways in which Black people in this country experience violence.
The white supremacist, overtly racist kind of violence, the violence of the state, police, and law enforcement, the violence of community.
And so in so many ways, my family story tracks right alongside Black America's story in how we experience the violence and carry the violence.
If you'd like to join the conversation with our guest, Tremaine Lee, author of the book A Thousand Ways to Die, you can go ahead and do so now.
Republicans 202-748-8001, Democrats 202-748-8000, and Independents 202-748-8002.
I'll read to you another portion of your book and get your comment on it.
It says this, my mother would never let us play with toy guns.
On birthdays and other celebrations, she would grow anxious at the sight of balloons because they threatened to explode unexpectedly like gunfire.
Decades later, she is still racked by the memory of the images of her daddy's body on a gurney on full display during the trial of the man who killed him.
My mother told me that losing a loved one to murder is like losing a limb.
Quote, it's almost like cutting off a major part of your body.
It's just like you have to learn to compensate, and you can't, really, because it's gone and it's never coming back.
They did their best to cope, but we're reminded every moment that they had been disfigured.
There's a deep unfairness in the pangs of this kind of death, of having a loved one snatched away so violently.
But there's also the unfairness of a carceral system that doesn't have the capacity or desire to value black life, let alone justice to black victims of violence, especially when the perpetrator is also black.
Can you talk about that last part, Tremaine, on black and black violence and what you consider dismissiveness on the part of the criminal justice system?
The idea of black lives mattering is almost cliche at this point, and it's such a charged up and loaded idea and phrase.
But when you think about in this country, the level of gun violence that we experience, and even though black people experience gun violence disproportionately, about half, almost a half of those who die by guns are also white.
And so America has a gun violence problem.
But then when we get into the engagement with the carceral system, the police and the investigators, the judges, and how we're sentenced, it's as disparate as and unequal as in life.
That if you kill a white man, you do substantially more time than you kill a black man.
So even in how we sentence folks, it still comes down to race and the value of the victim of that violence.
And so among the many layers of unfairness is what justice is, especially when you are black in this country and grappling with all of the, again, the liberal violence, the social and political violence.
And that the man who killed my grandfather, who murdered him over $160, was out in just a number of years.
And can you imagine if the roles were reversed?
And my grandfather or one of my uncles had murdered a white man, a white landowner, a white apartment owner, a landlord, what kind of time he would be doing.
And so it's just, it smacks in the face of the unfairness of it all, Mimi.
Let's talk to callers now, and we'll start with John in Leland, Mississippi, Independent Line.
Good morning.
unidentified
Good morning.
Sir, I just wanted to explain to you that this gun violence in America is just getting systemic.
It's ridiculous.
I just got out of the military 35 years ago in Chicago.
I was home like a week, and I get shot up.
My mother has to move to Mississippi.
I was in a mass shooting just two months ago, but 30 people were shot and eight people were killed.
I lost my cousin, my best friend, and it was just at a homecoming.
And the town has only had like 3,000 people.
And to do to have a mass shooting of 30 people and lose eight people in a town where everybody knows everybody, it affects you.
And it's just, and I'm just sick of this.
I'm a gun owner, but I would gladly give up all my weapons.
I would gladly do that if it would make people safe because this is our lives don't mean as much.
That's why people say black lives don't matter because, you know, it's like, like you say, if a person knows that they can just kill a person and they just get a slap on the wrist, they'll be out in three or four years.
And they know if they'll kill this other person, they'll get life or the death penalty.
Which one do you think is going to die?
Just like hunting animals, the animals that are going to get the most or get the most penalty.
You know, and I can feel the pain and the weight in your voice, brother.
And I think that's, there's two sides of this.
I think it's like not fully recognizing, and we have a phrase for this now.
So now we have more language that we're comfortable using, but the actual trauma of what it means to experience loss from guns.
And I often compare it to like, if we, if you're walking down the street with your child and you see somebody being jumped or beat up, you would shield their faces from that because of the level of violence.
But we have communities in this country that experience horrific gun violence every single day.
And it's been so normalized that it's garden variety, right?
It's garden variety.
But I really do believe that on the other side of that, and I speak to this in the book, while there are some communities that experience this horrific kind of routine violence, there are other places who their entire industries are built on the backs of selling guns and not just selling guns, but selling the fear of those who experience it most a world away, spurring this kind of pipeline of unchecked weapons into this country,
where gun manufacturers get political and economic deference while other communities are left to carry the true burden.
And I'm sorry to hear that.
Knowing what people have to carry, and it's so routine that one death would gut a family, a single death, let alone a community where you lose multiple people and you go house by house, neighborhood by neighborhood, and everyone is carrying a bit of that burden.
Everyone is carrying a bit of that trauma.
Everyone, their insides are a little twisted up and trying to cope and move forward.
It's an unfair burden.
And we have to wonder at what cost, at what cost, and who is benefiting from this?
I grew up in East LA, and I worked in South Central Los Angeles.
I, too, have had violence touch my family.
My stepfather was killed with a gun.
But I have a question because it's not the weapon.
What I found was it's education and educating children that there's something else out there other than where they live in the neighborhood that they grew up in.
There's a thing called learned helplessness.
And when you have that from generation to generation, you feel that there's no way out.
So my question is, what do you think, sir, is a way to help the children?
Because getting rid of the guns is not going to happen because if we turn in our weapons, the criminals will not turn in their weapons.
It's just not going to happen.
So we'd end up not protected.
So my question is, how can we turn the tide on this from generational issues that have been going on?
I don't think you're too far off base, but I think two things can be true.
I think the devastating actual power of a small concealable handgun, that kind of violence and that kind of tool designed to kill very efficiently and shatter flesh and bone, we have to engage with the gun itself.
We actually have to do that.
But I think you're right in long before the violence of the gun, there is the violence of hunger.
There is a violence of inadequate housing and health care.
There is a violence of existing in a capitalist society without any capital or resources.
There is the violence of being physically and psychologically targeted by law enforcement.
And so I think you are right.
You know, when I was a child, despite it all, my mother raised me with the idea that I am somebody, that I am special, and my life is worth protecting and maintaining at all costs, right?
I think there are a lot of young people in this country and children who experience all of those other forms of violence.
And then you add to that the trauma of witnessing actual violence and the loss from gun violence.
And so we do need to engage with people and not just tell them that they are somebody, but show them.
And how does a society who says it believes in equality and the future of its children, how do they engage with those communities?
Are we making sure that children are fed?
Are we making sure that they're not being exposed to lead in their pipes, right?
That there's some sort of remediation for all of the toxic exposure from chemicals, from the violence, from how they're portrayed on television.
All those things really do matter.
And so I think that for a lot of people in this country, young people in particular, it does feel that there is a big gaping hole that can't be filled by anything.
And so what happens when you have that tension and hurt and anger, oftentimes you turn it on yourself or you turn it against people closest to you.
And then you introduce into that formula of so much deprivation and so much hurt and so much anxiety and uncertainty and literal hunger.
You introduce a very cheap tool that can obliterate life in a second, in an instant.
I think what I hear you saying is, We got here by virtue of a very violent, inhumane system of chattel slavery that was only made possible by the genocide, intended genocide of peoples who already existed in this place.
And so the idea that, and we say this almost flippantly, but it's true that the blood of many peoples is in this soil.
And it was taken by force and taken by violence by people who had also gone across the world.
deploying the same amount of violence to subjugate and control and oppress other peoples.
And so there's zero doubt to me that the connection from which the violence from which this country was founded has been seeded in us and we carry it in various ways.
And there is a theory of epigenetics, that what a people's experience, what a people's experience, they carry with them in their genetics and it starts to reshape and reform people on a cellular level.
And so when you think about what black people have experienced in this country, even before we got here, and then all of the violence from which this country was founded, you know, it's shocking, but also obvious of how we've gotten here to this point.
Yeah, that trip to Africa was one that helped reshape my thoughts around the gun issue and the violence, but also what was actually lost.
And so in 2019, to commemorate the 400th year of the first enslaved Africans being dragged to what would become the United States, my family, along with hundreds of others, took a trip back to West Africa and we were in Ghana.
And there was this really profound moment that I experienced in a dungeon of one of these so-called slave castles.
And one thing that struck me was one, it was like, it was dank and dark and imagining human beings being kept in these conditions.
But one of the tour guides mentioned that above these cells where Black men and women and children would often be separated and held, that the European enslavers built a church right above the holding cell.
And so imagining that as these African peoples were having their gods and their spirits stripped away, that others were praying to their own gods and being in that space where human beings were traded for gold and minerals and other materials, as well as guns.
And that when we were shipped out of Africa, so few of us ever returned and made it back.
And so 400 years later, to stand there with my wife and my then small child doing what our people could never do, return, it felt empowering,
but also knowing full well what they never knew, what they would face in the Western world and the violence and the stripping of languages and cultures and their own sense of God and seeing themselves in God replaced with violence and a God that looks nothing like them and languages that were foreign on their tongues.
It was such a profound moment that just reshaped the way I thought about the slave trade.
I thought about humanity, but also boiling it back down to the research around the book, that our bodies were traded for guns and we'd carry with us literally that violence for generations after.
Let's talk to Melissa next in Bloomfield, Iowa, Independent Line.
Good morning, Melissa.
unidentified
Good morning.
Thanks for taking my call.
This is a little bit awful what I was going to say, but since you started talking about slavery and everything, we got to remember who actually sold the black Africans.
It was their own people that sold them to the white man.
So we need to get that story straight.
And number two, as far as gun violence goes, we need to remember that it's not the guns that kill people, it's the people that do it.
And if individuals could learn to use their mouths instead of using weapons, then maybe there wouldn't be so many people that get shot and killed nowadays because people can't use their mouths anymore because they don't have a good argument for what they're fighting over.
They're fighting over territory.
They're fighting over a corner to sell their drugs and this, that, and the other.
That is so stupid.
You want to talk about how people, you know, conquer other people to win land?
That's been going on since man was ever made.
That's never going to change.
But it's how it's done inside our states and inside our cities.
That's what needs to change.
And it changes with individuals' mindsets, not with taking away guns or anything else.
It's changing their mindsets on how they deal with things and how they handle things, using their words, their mouths.
And I think there are some seeds of truth in some of what you're saying.
And I detailed this in the book, that certainly Europeans came to exploit conflict on the region of Africa and did have African co-conspirators involved in this.
But I think there are a couple of layers here that you need to understand.
It's almost like how the mob comes to the neighborhood and says, hey, I can protect you.
You know, get down with us or you don't want any problems.
With European powers and gun technology rising and the sheer amount of gunpowder and firepower being shipped to West Africa under duress and force, right?
And so the idea that African regional powers were just super willingly, you know, fine, we'll just sell our own people.
That's not the total truth.
But also not knowing full well that what Europeans were doing was creating a brand new kind of slavery.
Certainly slavery existed for centuries before Europeans got involved.
But those enslaved people were still considered human, still were able to speak their language and have their religion, oftentimes the same religion as their enslavers, but they were always human.
Slavery in the United States would become a brand new kind of slavery where these enslaved people were no longer human beings.
And if you were born to an enslaved mother, you would forever be a slave.
That was a brand new kind of slavery.
So again, in the beginning, certainly there was collusion between co-conspirating co-conspirators on the continent and Europeans.
But this idea that their own people, also, they were selling prisoners of war.
These weren't their own family members.
And so we have to understand that even though we consider all Africans the same peoples, they were not the same peoples as much as Europeans were the same peoples.
They were different.
And certainly as we get to this point now, we have to work on de-escalation.
We have to work on what's operating in folks before the gun is ever introduced.
And so I think you're right in some ways and very, very terribly miseducated and wrong in others.
Yes, Tremaine, I'd just like to let you know that in 1898, Wilmington, North Carolina experienced their first insurrection in the United States of America with a man named Pitchfork Tillman.
Tillis, Red Shirts, killed over 1,500 to 2,000, maybe 2,000 or 3,000 black people in Wilmington, North Carolina.
It's never been given an insurrection, but it was the first insurrection in America.
That's the first part of my question.
The next one is that as gun violence goes from 60 to 65, we were very not as gun violent people as black people in America.
We had a few little guns here and there.
We were more or less people who were fought our arguments through fist fights and maybe somebody would pull out a knife every now and then.
But that kind of our overall mentality of how guns played a role in our lives did not take effect until around 1980, 85, when we had the guns in the black community.
My question to you is that can you kind of like give us some feel of how the guns get grow so quickly and it does did so much in the black community over a 15 to 20 year period.
And we did not necessarily bring those guns in.
Those guns are laid into our laps and we use them as a reverse of a way of protection, police protection, being a civil unrest for us to take care of our communities.
And then after that, it evolved into a more widespread thing because then the drugs came in.
But between 1964, 63, 64, and 1980, 85 were our whole tumultuous problem with guns and drugs and the violence of guns that has caused us a problem all the way up to today.
Please give me some sense of what that's all about.
I think, you know, many people became aware of the Tulsa Race Massacre through popular TV shows, right?
But when we think about the violence after Reconstruction was torn down into the early part of the 20th century, Wilmington, North Carolina, Atlanta, Arkansas, there were so many racial massacres in this country.
And in Wilmington, let's not forget who they targeted first, black newspapers.
And they were trying to track down the editor who was spurring what they believed was dangerous propaganda of black people asserting their rights.
And so there's so much violence that isn't taught in our textbooks.
So we don't understand the true nature of historic violence against black people.
But when it comes to the kind of apex of the violence we experienced in the 80s into the early 90s, and you mentioned the 60s, and you were right.
And I talk about this in the book.
After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and then the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in 64, 65, that was seen as a destabilizing force in the American hierarchy, social hierarchy.
Before then, the NRA was still pretty much a sports shooting foundation.
But after the massive civil rights gains of the 50s into the 60s, gun rights activists started turning the issue of guns and tying it to this expansion of freedom and citizenship to black people as something to be feared, as something dangerous.
Now that black folks have freedoms, they might be moving into your neighborhood and they might be coming to your children's school.
And there is something inherently dangerous and inherently violence in these people, inherently criminal.
And so what that did is empowered a gun rights movement, which in turn fueled and empowered the gun industry.
And so what we saw is a ramping up of not just the sale of guns, the legitimate boosting of the number of guns in society, but also seeding in white Americans in particular that you need a gun to protect yourself against this growing group of people who now have the freedom to come to your neighborhoods to live and to go to school and work next to you.
And so it's one of the most undercovered aspects of the civil rights movement is that the modern gun rights movement as we know it, which has given so much fuel and power and political and economic heft to the gun industry, is a direct response from the expansion of citizenship to black people and the fear it induced in so many in this country.
Ma'am, first of all, thank you very much for sharing that.
I know it's never easy for any of us to speak on the pain that we've had to carry.
And I think one of the things that has driven me in writing this book and talking about this book and sharing our story is that there isn't anything wrong with us.
And if we understand what's wrong with us and we want to understand the violence that we experience, look no further than the society from which we've come from and the level of deprivation and the level of harm, physical and psychological harm, so we can finally engage with that actual trauma.
Because what we've experienced in this country has been so normalized that we don't even call it trauma.
We just call it black life in America, right, for large part.
This is how we experience it.
But I think once we can point to it, we can put shape to it, we can understand the source of it, we can begin to untether ourselves and unburden ourselves and unload the weight of that trauma as much as we can so we can move freely.
Because as you mentioned, the way your family responded to that violence is to, it's like a chilling effect.
You have to move softer.
You have to move more carefully.
There is a limitation on our, not just our dreams, but our imagination of what's possible.
So we fall in line.
And that's one of the biggest, you know, the dangers of not fully addressing the trauma is that it can crush you in ways that we can put language to and ways that we can't.
It shifts the way we move.
You mentioned averting your gaze, lowering your shoulders, and teaching the next generation to tiptoe around a society that requires you to put your back up and move forward.
And so I think it's, you know, the idea of naming it and pointing to it and recognizing the source, which I'm trying to do in this book, is one of the most powerful things we do, we can do to move past the trauma.
And to that point, Tremaine, you say in your book that there was this unspoken rule in your family not to speak about the violence that your family experienced.
Why is that?
Why was that rule in your family and so many black families?
And why, I mean, to continue your thought about why you've decided to break that rule and to speak out.
We think about generations before who experienced, who came back from the war, the silent generation, who weathered so much and wouldn't talk about what they experienced.
The hurt and pain that continues to be in my family from the loss of my grandfather, and then the bits of pain and hurt carried on from generations earlier, it's just too much to bear.
And so part of the moving, trying to move forward, there is no full moving forward, but trying to move forward is to move on the best you can and not fully engage with that not sitting in your stomach, right?
Or that weight on your heart or that burden on your shoulders.
It's best just to move on.
But I do believe that the only way that we can fully process what we've been dealing with is to actually process it and talk about it.
And in that gap of information, understanding and historical and contemporary context and structural and racial context, we fill it with, it must be our fault.
It must be a people's fault, right?
And I think we need to loosen ourselves from that.
And so I think it was time to not only speak openly and honestly about what we've carried, but also put some respect on the names of those we've lost, those who have become part of these statistics and the numbers, but who are actually our grandparents, our uncles, our brothers, our sisters, to put some respect on the name and tell their story as fully and wholly as possible.
So the next generation coming behind us won't have to fill the gap with propaganda or racist tropes.
We can understand it and in hopes, try to avoid it as the best way we can.
In Jackson, Tennessee, on the line for independence, Ed, you're on with author Tremaine Lee.
unidentified
Hey, I think it ought to be mentioned that you remember former Supreme Court Justice Warren Berger said the greatest fraud on the American people by special interest groups was that interpretation of the Second Amendment for personal protection.
And also, only three countries in the world have anything like our Second Amendment.
Of course, that's us, Mexico, and Guatemala.
Most of the deaths are in the Western Hemisphere, and that's something.
But hey, Jermaine, listen to this fact, Torid.
They say it's not the gun.
The European Union has 450 million people.
The United States has 350 million people.
Total deaths from firearms in the total European Union is 6,700 people, 1,000 homicides per year, 5,000 suicides.
In the United States, we have about 48,000 firearm deaths, 27,000 suicides, 18,000 homicides.
Think about that.
And no country can make this statement.
The number one cause of death for young people are firearm deaths.
This is shameful of us.
And when people say it's not the gun, I just debunked that.
In 450 million people, they had 1,000 homicides with firearms.
They don't have firearms like we do.
No, and the Western Hemisphere is dominating homicide and murder and suicide with firearms.
Almost speechless, because I think you're putting a very fine and obvious point on the issue, where it's not just people wrestling with interpersonal issues.
It's the tool itself.
And that number you said that I think we don't address enough in the conversation around gun violence and gun homicide and gun death.
It's the suicides, 27,000 averaging a year of gun deaths.
Guns bring us closer to early death, period.
The destructive power of them turned against ourselves and our neighbors should be astounding.
But again, in the society that we have that values profit more than people and politics over people and profit and politics tied together has empowered the gun industry that profits to the tune of billions of dollars every single year for guns that never melt away, never degrade, never wither away.
These guns, seven to eight, nine million additional each year, that there are more guns in this country than Americans.
And then we wonder.
We wonder why they're being used to kill ourselves and kill our fellow Americans.
Without question, leading to the self-destruction of suicide or the self-destruction of recklessness with these guns.
And so I think you're hitting the nail again.
It's like there's this, society has created all of these fissures and gaps within us where based on how much money you have, where you live, your access to resources determines your well-being in this country.
And when you don't have access to those things, and then you introduce drugs as a bomb that doesn't work.
You introduce vice that doesn't work.
And then the natural next step is some degree of violence by gun or by other means.
And it speaks to a very specific kind of phenomenon that we experience in this country.
Well, I think you're right in that it's very disheartening.
I think you're right that most compassionate people ache.
But I think the issue is, and I'll answer the back part of your question first, but I think the issue is that we don't care enough to do anything about that issue because we've seeded this idea that there's something wrong with them as opposed to the conditions in which they're growing and rising in.
Young black people from homes with resources and college degrees aren't experiencing the same level of gun violence.
When we look at who's experiencing the gun violence, black and white, but especially black, we're looking at people who are poor, people who are hungry.
And if you were to take a map of where folks get the least amount of quality health care and where there aren't those jobs and aren't those incomes, and when you look at the wealth gap, where the average white family has a hundred times more wealth than black families, you have generations of young people who are growing up hopeless and don't see a path out.
And then you add to that the violence of police brutality, the violence of a system that criminalizes their existence.
And no wonder why, per everything we've talked about this hour, that young people are self-destructive.
And then you add to that these guns that are relatively cheap, relatively easy to get.
And when we look at the rising income and wealth inequality, we look at unemployment rising, where are these young people getting these jobs?
And when we have an education system, school systems that are funded by a property tax in communities where for the better part of the last 70 years, black people had been pushed into with red lines.
unidentified
We are going to leave this here and take you live now to the U.S. House, gaveling in for what's expected to be a brief session with no votes scheduled.
This is live coverage here on C-SPAN.
Lays before the House a communication from the Speaker.