Sex, Drugs & Tapas

newsweek:

This week’s cover story—Kill Zone—says gun control isn’t about rights in America’s cities. It’s about survival.

A preview:

SUMMER IS the killing season in American cities. The temperature rises and, yes, tempers do, too. And many young men who might have been in school are out in the streets taunting, hunting, and shooting at each other. Collateral carnage like the slaughter of Tyquran’s mother is inevitable, and for many innocents it’s inescapable in neighborhoods where young guys spray bullets. In Los Angeles County, with an estimated 450 gangs that have 45,000 members, about half the murders are gang related. Young men get shot again and again, and those who survive show a calm pride when they’re wheeled into the trauma units. As a wide-eyed British correspondent reported last week, the doctors call them “frequent fliers.” In Chicago, gang and gun violence is endemic, with 12 shootings last weekend and one death. And in New York, although the murder rate is much lower than the other cities, in the rougher parts of town that’s no guarantee of immunity. Between Friday and Sunday the first weekend in June, 26 people were shot and seven of them killed.

Over the last few months I’ve spent time with the New York Police Department and alone in parts of the city where guns are a way of life, but not in the way that pro-gun-rights partisans usually mean. I met kids like Tyquran and cops like Deputy Chief Theresa Shortell, head of the department’s fast-growing gangs division. And something that ought to be obvious kept hitting me. The embattled streets of the city and the gunland of the heartland are wildly different places, and the failure to understand that difference, and overcome it, is the great American tragedy of our time.

Read Christopher Dickey’s cover story (and take a look at his tumblr while you’re at it!).