Book

Who Killed Kenzo?

The Loss of a Son and the Ongoing Battle for Gun Safety

The book is available on Bookshop.org or Amazon.

About the Book

One Sunday afternoon, my fifteen-year-old son Kenzo was visiting a friend’s home when the boy quietly went to his father’s bedroom and picked up the semi-automatic handgun his father kept loaded and unlocked next to his bed for protection. After removing the ammunition magazine and thinking the gun was unloaded, he brought it back to his room where Kenzo was and pulled the trigger, expecting an impressive click. The bullet that lay hidden in the chamber killed Kenzo.

As my wife and I grieved, we discovered that guns are the only consumer product not regulated for safety and that on most days someone dies in America because someone gets a gun and does not know it is loaded. With the help of Jon Lowy, a brilliant Brady lawyer, my wife and I sued Beretta USA, arguing that the gun lacked important safety features, including a prominent chamber-loaded indicator that could have prevented Kenzo’s death. Our goal was to force the gun industry to sell safer handguns and thereby to prevent deaths like our son’s.

Who Killed Kenzo tells the story of the three trials spanning ten years in Dix v. Beretta USA. The case brought face-to-face in one courtroom lawyers from one of the nation’s largest gun violence prevention organizations to argue against the gun industry’s best experts over the causes of my son’s death. Readers will see why the leading public health experts said the gun was unsafe and how Beretta defended the design of its handgun. Although this book is written from my point of view, it is not just another one-sided “gun control” diatribe. It gives full voice to both sides of a vital, fascinating and ongoing American debate. Readers will also hear from jurors, why it was so difficult for them to reach a verdict

The final chapters are an account of how the coalition I joined passed two of the nation’s first laws establishing handgun safety standards. By forcing gun makers to design and sell handguns with safety features, these California laws led to a sixty-six percent reduction in the state’s rate of unintentional gun death.

Readers will find Who Killed Kenzo not only a deeply personal and dramatic narrative, but also a valuable resource for obtaining a complex understanding of the legal, moral and political issues underlying the ongoing fight for gun safety in America.

Advance Praise for Who Killed Kenzo?

Griffin Dix has written a story nobody wants to have to write. This page turner details the loss of Dix’s wonderful son Kenzo due to Family Fire. When Kenzo was visiting a friend, the boy got a gun from his father’s bedroom and thought he’d unloaded it by removing the magazine that had bullets in it. But a round was still hidden in the chamber, and the friend unintentionally killed Kenzo. Dix realized the unregulated gun lacked crucial safety features.

Against all odds, with the support of wonderful lawyers from Brady and a group of like-minded activists, he helped transform the gun industry and state laws across the country. This book shows how one man, and a small coalition can truly change the world. It is a page turner in the manner of A Civil Action. I hope it inspires many more to join the fight for gun safety in America.

Kris Brown
President, Brady United Against Gun Violence

Beautifully written, “Who Killed Kenzo” is a true life who done it about a decades-long saga of one dad’s search for justice.  It should be mandatory reading for every lawyer who aspires to sue a politically corrupt industry. For the rest of us, “Who Killed Kenzo” is a life lesson on persistence. Heartbreaking at times, this incredibly well-sourced story about a young boy’s fatal shooting will take readers on a roller-coaster ride of emotions — furious following a courthouse defeat, to jubilation after a hard-fought win in the California statehouse. 

Donna Dees Thomases

Founder of the Million Mom March and co-author, Looking for a Few Good Moms: How One Mom Rallied a Million Others Against the Gun Lobby

Griffin Dix took a personal tragedy—the loss of his beloved son Kenzo—and turned it into decades of selfless advocacy aimed at ending our nation’s epidemic at gun violence. This book takes the reader through Dix’ heartbreaking journey, revealing the obstacles created by the gun industry to block sensible firearm safety laws and prevent justice in the courts for those who have been harmed by the industry’s callous and profitable behavior.  Who Killed Kenzo is a compelling and educational read for anyone who cares about America’s plague of gun violence.

Juliet Leftwich
Former Legal Director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence

Who Killed Kenzo? is a firsthand account of the personal devastation caused by America’s epidemic levels of gun violence. It is also the story of one bereaved father’s altruistic, David vs. Goliath fight against Beretta USA and the gun industry. With vivid scenes of courtroom battles, and revelations of gun industry intractability, this book is a case study of the effects of our lack of regulation of guns for consumer safety.

By addressing this topic and intertwining the personal with the political, Who Killed Kenzo? makes a unique contribution to the literature of gun violence in the U.S.

Unfortunately, however, the personal elements of Dix’s struggle are hardly unique. The aching and preventable loss of his teenage son will be instantly recognizable for too many Americans who have lost a loved one in gun-related homicides, suicides, and accidents in the years since Kenzo was killed by a friend playing with his father’s loaded gun.

Dix’s tale is also the record of middle-aged metamorphosis, of a mild-mannered professor and researcher, turned activist to ensure that the gun industry and elected officials act to prevent future deaths.

Who Killed Kenzo? delivers quietly furious testimony to the truth that nobody is safe from the gun crisis in the U.S. As the educated, white anthropologist Dix puts it, his family shockingly discovered “an American reality that we had always assumed had nothing to do with us.”

Who Killed Kenzo? has the makings of a riveting, important, and timely movie. It captures vignettes of hardened lawyers and apologists for the gun industry, and includes cameos of some of the leading gun safety advocates of this generation.

Dix describes the impact of Kenzo’s death on the dissolution of his marriage, and on his mental and physical health, and asks readers: how can what happened to Kenzo be prevented in the future? Who is responsible for these endless deaths? The boy who pulled the trigger and his father, or the gun industry and the legislators who fear it? The question seems simple, but the answer is multi-layered, intriguing and complex. That’s why the jurors in Dix v. Beretta USA had such a hard time.

Dix’s odyssey met with some success. Years after Kenzo’s death, the activism of Dix and others helped strengthen gun safety laws in California and elsewhere.

This memoir will appeal to many: a general nonfiction audience; family members and victims of gun violence; city, state and federal policy makers; lawyers; law students; readers of social issue-oriented memoirs, and those concerned to see that gun violence doesn’t come knocking on their own door.  

Ellen Freudenheim
MPH, co-founder, Committee for Silent March, co-founder, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence