Gun violence in America remains as tragically insufferable as it is irresolvable, but award-winning journalist Hazel Trice Edney gives the dilemma a fresh reality by noting that Black youths in this country suffer the most from gun violence. A few paragraphs into her story, Edney lets us know that this disparate impact on the Black community is not new.
Even so, she graphically highlights her research by focusing on victims of gun violence, none more gripping than her profile of Sierra Jenkins, a former news assistant for CNN and a reporter with the Virginian Pilot newspaper.
In March of last year, Jenkins’s editor tried to reach her to assign her to cover a shooting incident in downtown Norfolk, Va. His phone calls to her went unanswered. The editor had no idea that as he phoned her to cover a shooting incident, she herself was a victim of a proposed assignment.
Edney discusses several other people killed by gun violence, and it may take these intimate treatments to further arouse the nation to just how much gun violence permeates our society.
Each death as a result of gun violence has its particular elements, but the one thing they have in common is the presence of a gun to resolve whatever conflict or problem precipitated the lethal end.
We have grappled with this problem time and time again on our pages, and there is no easy remedy or answer. At the end of her article, Edney highlights some of the measures advanced by Virginia Representative Bobby Scott, who centers his concern on assault weapons and the size of gun magazines. Background checks are also mentioned.
But too many of the shooting incidents involve small-caliber weapons, and handguns that are even easier to purchase and conceal.
Still, we need more coverage of the sort delivered by Edney, in which the victims are more than another statistic, and their lives deftly contextualized and humanized.