Yes, People Kill People Is Banned!

People Kill People follows six young people whose lives converge at a gun show in Arizona. Written in Hopkins’s signature verse style, it traces lines of hate, fear, and desperation through characters on different sides of the gun debate, immigration, and white supremacy. The narrator is Rand, a personification of hatred itself. The novel doesn’t preach a particular political position. It shows how ordinary people get pushed toward violence by ideology, trauma, and access to weapons.

Ellen Hopkins is one of the most banned authors in America, and People Kill People sits firmly on Moms for Liberty’s target list. The Alpine School District in Utah banned it alongside four other Hopkins titles following the implementation of H.B. 29 in 2024. Keller ISD in Texas and Clay County in Florida pulled it from shelves in 2023. The Wentzville School District in Missouri removed it in 2022. Hopkins herself has said the people pushing these bans “act like they’re concerned for the kids, but they’re not.”

Why You Should Read This

Hopkins writes about guns the way she writes about meth in Crank or sex trafficking in Tricks: by putting you inside the heads of people living it. There’s no safe distance here. You’re in the skin of a white supremacist, an undocumented immigrant, a gun show vendor, a girl fleeing domestic abuse. The verse format strips away any padding, leaves you with bone and nerve.

The book asks one question and refuses to answer it for you: who’s responsible when someone pulls a trigger? The gun? The ideology? The system that failed to intervene? Banning a book that forces teenagers to sit with that question, especially in a country where school shootings are routine, is cowardice dressed up as protection. Kids deserve to wrestle with hard ideas before those ideas wrestle with them.