From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

The stories are played out daily in newspapers and TV news shows: a teenager in a big-city slum whips out a gun and starts firing; a group of kids go on a shooting spree; two boys fight, and suddenly one of them is shot dead. As more kids acquire guns, the stats on violence grow, but rarely do we learn much about the person who pulled the trigger -- or why and how he got the gun in the first place.

Nation editor Steve Koepp set out to deepen our understanding of the teen gun culture and, together with Chicago bureau chief Jon Hull, decided to tell the story through the kids themselves. Instead of focusing on a big city, Hull suggested a mostly white working-class neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska, a place filled with tidy homes, barbecues and neatly manicured lawns. "I wanted to show that even a conservative heartland city with 3% unemployment is reeling from violence," he says. "If Omaha can't win the battle against youth violence, what hope does Los Angeles or Chicago have?"

Hull spent five weeks in Omaha, hanging out with a 16-year-old, named Doug in the story, and his friends. Since Hull couldn't exactly sit in their bedrooms listening to Megadeth while their parents cooked dinner, many of the interviews took place on the street, in fast-food restaurants or cruising in their cars. "After countless hours listening to their fears, frustrations and dreams," he says, "I began to realize that most of these young guys are intensely lonely and angry. For many of them, guns are considered the most logical attention getter and problem solver available."

Most of the teenagers Hull encountered were surprisingly well mannered and anxious to talk about themselves, once they had let down their defenses. But while he could empathize with their pain, says Hull, "the story left me despairing for the future of our youth. A lot of kids I talked to feel the same way and yearn for the time when they could just have a fistfight and be done with it.

"Many parents would be horrified to realize what their teenagers are up to these days," Hull says. "By writing this story, I hoped to grab our readers and plunge them into a world they didn't know. I wanted to make them understand that although adolescents have always rebelled, they have never been so well armed."

I'm confident that after you read Jon's piece, you will know that world well -- and find it chilling.