REVIEW: Soft Targets: Guns in America and the Kids Caught in the Crossfire by Camila Kerwin

Reviewed by DW McKinney

Cover of the book Soft Targets by

The Columbine High School shooting happened on April 20, 1999. I was in eighth grade. The news of the shooting drifted through campus like a rumor. I didn’t believe it until our teachers, their voices shaking, spoke about it. Grief and shock weighed on everyone for the rest of the day. We carried hypervigilance heavy on our bodies as we walked through the hallways.

That could happen? And at a school of all places?

I remember two things most clearly from the aftermath. The Christian martyrdom that rose from evangelicals weaponizing student Cassie Bernall’s death, and how the shooting reshaped who people believed were perpetrators of gun violence. It wasn’t just Black people in crime-riddled neighborhoods. It was also disaffected young white men wearing trench coats.

Who carries the blame for gun violence (and its history) is far more complicated. Journalist Camila Kerwin dissects these complications in her debut nonfiction graphic narrative Soft Targets: Guns in America and the Kids Caught in the Crossfire (Street Noise Books; Oct. 2026).

Gun rights and ownership is a fraught conversation in our country. To put it plainly: everyone has feelings. Kerwin begins the graphic novel by being honest about hers. Her interest in guns began on a personal level. Her stepfather, Bill, taught her how to shoot, and he owned a gun collection that he kept behind lock and key. Kerwin was openly fascinated by his guns and wanted to handle them whenever he allowed her. “The guns were always there in the big safe,” she writes. “They were like a totem of his worldview, where toughness, protectiveness, and a sort of cosplay of cowboy self-reliance prevailed.”

Leading that cosplay for a time was actor Charlton Heston. Surprisingly, the five-term National Rifle Association president isn’t mentioned in the book, but I remember reading about his rallying cry at an NRA convention the year after Columbine. As he held up a rifle he growled, “From my cold, dead hands.” Even as a freshman in high school then, Heston sounded ghoulish to me. Owning guns seemed to be more important than better protecting people from them. The insistence on owning guns is why, as Kerwin states, “researchers estimate the United States now has over 400 million guns — more firearms than people.”

Each statistic in Soft Targets arrives with its own devastating revelation. However, the data constructs the intricate narrative scaffolding that details the vast scale of gun violence in America and the systemic processes that uphold it. Kerwin profiles former NRA leaders and interviews prominent individuals such as a former CDC researcher and the founder of the National African American Gun Association. Their stories add greater contextualization to both national gun advocacy and its criticism. Kerwin’s goal isn’t to push us in any one direction, but to give us information for us to better shape our own opinions.

For a time, Michael Moore’s 2002 film Bowling for Columbine was synonymous with gun violence criticism. Kerwin achieves what Moore was unable to do. She provides comics journalism that treads a balance and respects as many angles to the topic as it can. There’s no skewing (or skewering).

With that, Kerwin steps deeper into the devastating wreckage left behind by gun violence.

“In 2020, guns became the leading cause of death for kids and teens in the U.S.” These deaths are the book’s gentle heart. Kerwin centers portraits of four children and teenagers touched by gun violence in America: Joaquin Oliver, 17, murdered in the 2018 Parkland shooting; Makiyah Wilson, 10, victim of a drive-by shooting; Jonah Payne, 17, suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound; and Ethan Song, 15, killed from an accidental gun discharge.

When the research becomes dense and threatens to hamper the narrative, Kerwin breaks it up with one of these portraits.

There’s nothing gory or brutal about them. The graphic novel is mostly illustrated in black and white, but soothing yellow highlights are applied in the portraits. Kerwin’s playful character drawings are slightly cartoonish in a style reminiscent of cartoonist Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes). They’re further amplified by quotes and memoiristic recordings of the deceased.

We get a real sense of four distinct personalities and habits that Kerwin imbues with tenderness. She sketches out each child’s daily habits and friendships, before leading us into the moments where gun violence strikes them down. It’s heart-wrenching, but we’re meant to empathize, never pitying or becoming overwhelmed with grief.

What I was drawn to most about the portrayals was how well they depict the breadth of gun violence and how easily it touches our everyday lives. Quite simply, I saw myself in the panels.

Before Columbine rocked my sense of the world, a shop owner shot my birth father dead for robbing his store. I was six. When I was nine or ten, my mother pulled me out of the crossfire between police and a gunman when we were visiting New York City to see a play. In junior high, I knew kids my age who had been shot or would be shot by the time we graduated high school. My senior year of high school, I was caught in the crossfire of a gang assassination. (“Though guns became the leading cause of death of children in 2020, they had already been the leading cause of death of Black children for nearly 15 years.”)

Kerwin’s portrayals don’t merely give face to the statistics; they show a reality that we desperately need to confront completely.

“Nearly 47,000 people die from guns in the US each year.” What Kerwin doesn’t mention is how that number doesn’t quantify people who are injured by guns or become secondary victims who witness the violence or suffer mental distress in the aftermath. Considering the sheer number of secondary victimizations, that truth we must face is more monumental than we could ever imagine.

In a book about gun violence, gut punches are expected, but an unexpected one arrives in the unveiling of the book’s title. When you read it, it’s a doozy the more you think about it. For me, it spurred philosophical questions about who gets to protect themselves and how we can foster a society where no one is a target at all.

Since reading Soft Targets, the news stories featuring gun fatalities and injuries have accumulated daily. A gunman at an In-N-Out Burger in Idaho. A masked shooter on Coney Island. A man in Montana killed his relatives, including children.

It’s a Sisyphean task to keep track of it all. What seems even harder? Approaching gun regulation with an earnestness and radical empathy to change the trajectory of gun deaths and related violence in the country.

I’ve always thought this solution was naïve in a society bent toward capitalism, exceptionalism, and rabid domination. But Kerwin posits a similar one near the end of Soft Targets: could an extraordinary problem be overcome with extraordinary grace?

It seems too simple. But voiced by another person, that insurmountable task appears conquerable after all.