RJ Young’s writing has appeared in Reuters, the Oklahoman, and USA Today. He is pulled over by the police more often than most white people change their sheets. His book, Let It Bang: A Young Black Man’s Reluctant Odyssey Into Guns (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), explores the quest, funny and searing, of a young man black man learning to shoot—a fascinating odyssey into race, guns, and self-protection in America. The most RJ Young knew about guns was that they could get him killed. Until, recently married to a white woman and in desperate need of a way to relate to his gun-loving father-in-law, Young does the unimaginable: he accepts Charles’s gift of a Glock. Let It Bang is an utterly original look at American gun culture from the inside, and from the other side—and, most movingly, the story of a young black man’s hard-won nonviolent path to self-protection.
