"Gunshots Were the Soundtrack of My Childhood"
The shared trauma of normalized gun violence in Black communities
By: Joshua Harris-Till
Some people describe the sound as a car backfiring. Others, popcorn on a hot fire. To me though, gunshots were the soundtrack of my childhood.
I was six years old the first time I was shot at. My friends and I were riding our bikes around the neighborhood, as kids do, when we heard someone yelling at us. I don’t remember exactly what he said; the bullets that flew around us, though, got our attention.
But just as quickly as they flew out of that gun, so too did they fly out of my memory. Because even at six, gunfire wasn’t anything new to me. We were trained to live around gun violence — to get down, to look out for slow-moving cars, to run when the shooting stopped.
While that training may very well have kept us alive, it reflected an insidious reality which dominates Black communities across the country — that gun violence is the norm. It has continued to be the norm to this day.
That forced inoculation to gunfire, common for far too many Black people in this country, dulled nearly all of the countless experiences with gun violence I’ve had. It wasn’t until one night in 2013 when I felt in my core the searing pain and overwhelming, omnipresent shadow of gun violence.
That night in Dallas, a man shot eight people in an act of domestic violence. My sister Neima, her mother Zina, both shot and killed, my two little brothers both shot and wounded. My three-year-old nephew, forced to watch his mother’s murder and testify about it in court.
We became a dot on a map that night — a map so filled with dots that it was hard to see what was underneath. And the people taken in mass shootings that those dots represent, that’s not even a hundredth of the people who die every year to gun violence.
2019 was the last time I was shot at. What we fully expected to be nothing more than a celebration brought back a lifetime of shooting-based childhood trauma. The moment happened so fast that it would be another 45 minutes before I would realize I had been grazed by a bullet, just inches away from my heart.
We don’t have to live like this, and this doesn’t have to be our normal.
Black children shouldn’t have to grow up like I did, with gunshots a more common refrain than ice cream truck songs on warm summer days; and with Black children and teens being 13 times more likely to be hospitalized for a firearm assault than white children and teens.
That’s why I’m sharing my story today. Fifty-eight percent of adults in the United States — and 68% of Black and Latino Americans — are survivors of gun violence. By early February, we reached a sad landmark here in the U.S.: more people will have been killed by guns here than will be killed with guns in an entire year in our peer nations.
Our stories matter. We’re not just dots on a map. And the continued, shared trauma of normalized gun violence in Black communities, it’s a burden we shouldn’t have to bear.
Joshua Harris-Till is the former National President of the Young Democrats of America and an Executive Committee Member of the DNC. Based in Oklahoma, he previously served as the State President of Young Democrats of Oklahoma and sat on the Central Committee for the Oklahoma Democratic Party. Joshua's diverse political experience includes roles as a Legislative Assistant, Director on various political campaigns, and the 2022 Democratic Nominee in Oklahoma's 5th Congressional district. He currently serves as a Communications Director for Moms Demand Action and is a recent National Advisory Board member for Generation Progress Gun Violence Prevention initiative. Joshua's dedication to youth outreach and engagement has earned him multiple awards, and he finds fulfillment in inspiring young people to become passionate advocates.
Image of window with gunshots by JR from Pixabay; photo of Joshua Harris-Till courtesy of autor.