I’ve wanted to talk to Gary since his award winning investigation for the Guardian in 2018, Beyond The Blade, where he took a similar approach to another day in the death of america: except he took a year, not a day, and he told the stories of the 39 children and adolescents who had been stabbed to death, in 2017. Gary has lived in both America - where he wrote extensively about gun culture - and now, back in the UK, where he has written extensively about knife crime, and I don’t think there’s anyone who descontructs the myths around social violence, like Gary.

We discuss why knife crime is a public health issue, why the term ‘knife crime’ itself is a social construct lacking in context, the ramifications of shutting down shared, free spaces for adolescents and how we won’t ever get on top of it until we understand that knife crime is about poverty, not race.

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