Inside the Hidden Lives of Children Caught in America’s Gun Violence Epidemic
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.”)
