I BELIEVE THESE CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE – THEY’VE BEEN TAUGHT WELL AND ARE LEADING THE WAY. Love, support and congratulations, to ALL that marched and supported the children today. I salute them for standing up, using their voice and being aware. I salute them because they’re marching for my daughter.
Gun violence is nothing new and the solution is simple. This blog is not about that. It is, a few words – bullet points if you will – about the presence of gun violence since my existence.
- 1963 – John F. Kennedy is assassinated / I was born – up until I was twelve years old, it felt like a current event, in my community.
- 1965 – Malcolm X is assassinated.
- 1968 – Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. are assassinated.
Four assassinations of positive global figures by the time I was five. 
I was in the Capitol this past March 16th. Fifty years prior in1968, from the Caucus Room of the Old Senate Office Building, the same place his late brother declared his candidacy for president eight years earlier, Senator Robert F. Kennedy announced his intention to run for President.
I was born in an era where police brutality in “urban” neighborhoods was standard procedure. In 1975, Laurence Fishburne (then known as “Larry’), Rosiland Cash, Bernie Casey and Moses Gunn, starred in the film “Cornbread, Earl & Me.” It was about a neighborhood basketball star that was shot, because a police officer, “mistakenly” thought his sandwich or orange soda was a gun. This depiction was RELEASED in ’75. The thought of incidents that occurred like this prior, that drove the inspiration for a narrative of this reality, is staggering. The sad and unfortunate truth of gun violence, police brutality, and “Black on Black Crime” in “da hood” is that it was all engineered, and it worked.
- 1975 – “Cornbread, Earl & Me” hits movie theaters.
- 1976 through 2011 – An unimaginable number of atrocities of this nature surely occurred merely based on incidents of the same nature over the past six years…
- 2012 – Trayvon Martin is assassinated while holding skittles and an Arizona iced tea.
- 2014 – Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, is shot twice by police in Cleveland. He died on the following day. Rice’s toy gun was later found to be an airsoft replica, that lacked the orange safety feature marking it as fake, as opposed to a true firearm.
- 2018 – Stephon Clark was shot and killed by Sacramento Police, while holding a cell phone, in his own backyard. https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/22/us/sacramento-police-shooting/index.html
The first school shooting of horrific note in this latter day was Columbine in 1999.
On December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut, a 20-year-old killed 20 children between 6 and 7 years old and six members of an elementary school staff. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, put their feet down after the tragedy at their school, and the world marches with them. Seventeen people were killed and seventeen were wounded this past February 14th , which made it one of the world’s deadliest, school massacres.
In addition to the 850,000 that gathered in Washington, D.C., there were approximately 800 other events in protest of gun violence around the the world over the weekend. New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, and Baltimore all held rallies. New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Belgium, India, and Antarctica, all had demonstrations as well.
The slogan for the “March for Our Lives” movement is “Enough Is Enough” – I’m with them. #Imwitthem
http://abcnews.go.com/International/march-lives-takes-place-world-london-berlin/story?id=53982310
Acknowledgements in hope of ACTUAL change
c-dub
