Free Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives by Gary Younge

not only emphasizing their vulnerability but also declaring their inherent innocence and insistingupon 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 whohas 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.

    K ENNETH M ILLS -T UCKER 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