#five bullets

[victusinveritas]

[victusinveritas]

[victusinveritas]

[katrani]

2026 Books: Five Bullets

So in my attempts in recent years to read more nonfiction, I've come to find stuff covering events from like 1960-2000 (aka, stuff that happened AFTER my school's cutoff for what they explained through to stuff that happened before I was cognizant of current events) to be the most fascinating, because it helps me contextualize how the world is now and what the patterns in politics might be. Which means when I saw that there was a pair of books covering a pretty sensationalized gun violence crime coming out at the same time, each with a different focus, I was like heck yeah, why not. (Sadly the other book seems way more popular and I got waiting listed for it, so no reading them back to back.) And so I started reading this book about the Bernie Goetz shooting in 1984 and the procedural nonsense that followed.

I feel like it was a pretty thorough piece. It did a lot of humanizing of everyone involved, from Goetz and the four teens he attacked to the lawyers to the jury to the judge. Maybe a little too much, or a little biasedly. Like I know the teens didn't do a lot of media appearances, so there's not nearly as much information to go on, but the author was very clear when he was speculating about everyone else's mindset, but there's very little about the teens, proportionally. Still, the book makes it clear why the jury reaching the decision they did is maybe not so much a "what the fuck" as one would initially think when hearing about the one-paragraph summary, and where various mistakes were made by both prosecution and defense that would have created bias. There's a really good overview of NYC at the time, a decent broad strokes of the local social and political climate. Also the author is both pretty witty and decent at breaking down why legal definitions might be fuzzier than common sense ones. There's one bit where he's explaining why definitions might be hammered out during trial and includes some phrasing like "the inherent gun-ness of a gun..." Idk it made me chuckle. The one nitpick I have is that like. After a whole book. Of being clear about the distinction between actually doing something and being legally responsible for it. About various mistakes that police and lawyers can make. About how the flurry of immediate news reporting can create false ideas or exaggerations about a situation. About how things can drag out for years before all the information is available to the public. In the conclusion, the author lists various other violent crimes that have happened since, involving either racism or gun violence or both. And the final one he includes mentions "Brian Thompson's killer Luigi Mangione". Not. "Alleged killer", not "accused killer", not anything else, just. Flat out contributing to the sensationalizing. Like. My dude. What. Way to fuck with how I'm reading your trustworthiness in literally the last 3 pages??????

[katrani]

"Anyone who rides the New York City subway will, at some point, encounter a roving performer or panhandler."

-Five Bullets, by Elliot Williams