"Just put the guns down, it is not worth it," said the victim's sister. "We are dying too young. Put them down, we are hurting our babies. We are hurting families. It should not go that far. Put them down, save a life."
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All throughout 2020 since March, anyway a song rattled around in my head: People Who Died, by the Jim Carroll Band. It was a minor hit in the early 1980s; maybe you know it. Carroll, the punk-poet author of
The Basketball Diaries, wrote it as a sort of tribute to friends he knew who died before their time. Some of them met wild ends: a guy killed by bikers, a woman who jumped in front of a subway train. Others left Earth via less dramatic but nevertheless heartbreaking routes. My favorite line goes:
Bobby got leukemia, fourteen years old / He looked like sixty-five when he died / He was a friend of mine. The chorus goes: