The new year has once again been marked with numerous acts of gun violence, including multiple mass shootings.
The scale of gun violence our country faces is overwhelming — and it feels like with each incident our collective response has been to become more and more numb.
But we have to remember that the tens of thousands lost to gun violence every year in the U.S. aren’t numbers. They are our children. Our brothers and sisters; parents, teachers, and friends.
As a gun violence survivor, telling my family’s story is hard. But it’s a choice I make to honor my son by trying to put somebody else in our shoes to help them understand the true trauma and impact gun violence causes.
My oldest son, Felix Andre Snipes, was born Friday, July 21, 1989, and on Friday, Aug. 31, 2018 his life was taken by senseless gun violence.
He was just 29 years old. It was right before the first football game of the Junction City High School Blue Jays’ season when I received the call from my husband, Willie.
I was shocked and knew something was wrong because Willie, a 20-plus years veteran football coach of the Blue Jays, and pillar of our community, never called right before a game.
He told me that Felix had been shot. I rushed to our local hospital in a feeling of surreal panic. Once I arrived, I watched EMTs and nurses roll Felix into the helicopter — they were airlifting him to a hospital with a trauma department.
They wouldn’t let us go near our son. That hurts me to this day.
I couldn’t go near the helicopter to let him know we were there, to comfort him, to give him a kiss, nor to let him know that I love him.
But their hopes were in vain as well as ours — Felix would not survive his injuries.
To this day, I can’t handle the sound of a helicopter.
He is missed every day. Being a survivor of gun violence is all too common in the U.S. and especially among Black people. All told, 59% of adults in America identify as survivors of gun violence.
However those numbers are even higher among communities of color: 71% of Black adults and 60% of Latinx adults in America are survivors.
Gun violence is an epidemic that kills more than 40,000 people per year, and wounds nearly twice as many.
