He pleaded against gun violence; bullets silenced him

pulse 05:29 - 11 September 2018

Johnson, a 19-year-old who loved to sing and dance, who was an athlete and a budding social activist, will not get to see that vision realized. He was shot and killed Wednesday after playing basketball near his home.

When they staged a “die-in” at Stroger Hospital in Chicago earlier this year, Delmonte Johnson and his friends — who together formed GoodKids MadCity, a group dedicated to ending violence in urban communities — had a straightforward request.

They wanted what their wealthier, whiter, more suburban peers already seemed to have: freedom from the oppressive fear of being gunned down in their own neighborhoods.

Johnson’s death was tragic and unnecessary and enraging. It was also the sort of death that’s become far too common in the United States, and in particular in Johnson’s hometown, where more than 2,000 people have been shot so far this year, almost 400 of them fatally. While mass shootings involving high-powered guns and high death tolls have claimed an outsize portion of the nation’s collective grief — and its headlines — street shootings like the one that killed Johnson are far more common.

Johnson, who lost several of his own friends to gun violence, knew that fact all too well. His own advocacy emerged in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in February with the hope that some of the attention captured by that massacre might be cast toward communities like his — communities that are underserved, overlooked and routinely plagued by gun violence. “We have been screaming for gun control for the longest time,” said Carlil Pittman, a friend of Johnson’s who co-founded GoodKids MadCity. “But it’s not until it hits other communities that people pay attention. And then they respond with harsher laws that criminalize black and brown kids.”

Pittman, Johnson and their fellow activists pushed for better solutions in their community, including mental health and youth employment initiatives as well as trauma-informed schools, where children who lose friends and family members to gun violence can receive counseling instead of punishment — such as detention, expulsion or even criminal charges — when they act out of grief.

Johnson spent the past months of his short life working to defeat the very plague that killed him. He protested. He volunteered. He raised funds. He served his community. Americans can honor his legacy by continuing that advocacy and pushing for an end to gun violence in all corners of the country.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.