It’s not often that I find myself struggling to piece together words when I feel compelled to write. In most cases the words seamlessly flow out of me in rhythmic fashion, kind of like I was told exactly what to say. But when I began writing this piece months ago, I was deeply perplexed—perplexed because I questioned my thoughts and our social realities. Perplexed because I struggled to reconcile the two in determining how it should influence the direction of this piece. Feeling this way, I decided to take some time away to reflect, research, and allow the divinity of time to have its say. And it did.

On a cold Thursday morning in the winter of 2016, my usual 6 a.m. alarm woke me out of my sleep with a blaring ring that could’ve woken up the entire house. Although I was in my final year of my undergraduate studies, this alarm wasn’t a signal that I should get ready to catch the bus for class. I didn’t have class on Thursdays. It also wasn’t a signal to get ready for work, because at the time, I wasn’t working. What this alarm did was tell me that it’s time to take my mom to work so that I could use her car to go the gym in the afternoon. And I did just that. I got up, put on some socks, jogging pants, a puffer, and sat downstairs until it was time to drop my mom off, just as I would on any other day.

After dropping her off and returning home, I would always go back to sleep, roughly until 9 a.m. when I’d start my day. And this day was no different. I went back to sleep, woke up around this time and did my usual morning routine. Walking back to my room, I said good morning to my family as we crossed paths on our way to our bedrooms. And after I changed, I darted downstairs to the kitchen to quickly prepare and eat my breakfast before leaving for the gym.

I would always go to the gym around noon to work out with my friends who were more experienced weightlifters. They would always push me to my limits, correct my mistakes, and school me on life in between sets. And after about 90 minutes of this we’d go our separate ways, dap each other and say, “Same time tomorrow?” as we walked away.

When I got home, I brought my bag to my room and then went to the kitchen for my protein shake. I recall my aunt being in the living room—us laughing and talking about our day, and in the middle of doing this my phone rang. I took my phone out of my pocket to see who was calling and saw it was my dad. With a smile on my face, I answered the phone and said, “Wham?” (a Jamaican word to ask, “what’s up?”). In every conversation with my dad, he would’ve responded with, “Nothing much son, I’m just here. I’m checking on you.” But this time was different. Instead, I heard soft whimpering—attempts to hold himself back from crying, and immediately, I felt a pit in my stomach. Why? Because we didn’t cry. No matter what happened, we didn’t cry.

“They killed your brother,” he struggled to get out. “What?!” I quickly responded, my face looking as if I had seen a ghost, processing what he had just said. “They killed your brother.”

My passion for writing this piece initially came after I had attended a vigil in Toronto for the victims of the Buffalo shooting on May 14^th, 2022. I’m sure you all remember this day—a white man entered a Buffalo supermarket and shot 13 people, killing 10 of them who were Black. I remember seeing the news about the killings and feeling disgusted. I found it deeply troubling. But I also recall trying to mediate my feelings, knowing all the research I had done on racial shootings indicated that statistically interracial shootings play far less of a role in the killings of Black people than intraracial shootings. I knew this information. But I found it hard to conciliate this idea with the day-to-day experiences of Black people, where the inundation of navigating multiple institutional barriers and social perceptions seems at odds with these statistics.

Even with this internal struggle the fact remains that over the years Black and racialized communities have been targeted by white mass shooters multiple times; but according to my research, the same can’t be said for white communities being targeted by Black and racialized people. And although my past writings sought to expose some of the fallacies in our focus in improving the experiences for Black people, I felt as though I should write about this as a racial topic, seeing it as the core issue to the Buffalo Massacre. Internally I settled on this direction. I was certain that this was my approach. And then, just 10 days later, there was another mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered. Again, I found myself disgusted and saddened with what had taken place.

The experience of these feelings is exactly why I’ve told the story about my brother. I imagined the victims and the families of these victims waking up, brushing their teeth in the morning, and preparing their lunch. I imagined them hugging their parents or children on their way out the doors—maybe even arguing in the morning before going about their day. I imagined the victims of the Buffalo shooting checking their fridge for eggs realizing they had to take a quick trip to the store. I pictured students trash talking their friends about how they were going to beat them at basketball after school—things these people would’ve done on any other day, because it was normal. No fear needed to be attached to these things. All of these things done in confidence, without a concern or thought of not returning home, not knowing that this day would be their last day, because of a killer with a gun.

With all of this in mind, I saw it necessary for myself to assess mass shootings in 2022—being where four or more people, not including the shooter, are injured or killed—at large in the U.S. to find commonalities. Notably, there are different definitions of mass shootings. If we restrict the definition of mass shootings to four or more people (not including the shooter) that are killed, we find that up to this point, 19 mass shootings have occurred. Many researchers and publications use this definition to seemingly minimize the commonality of mass shootings, seeking to lower public hysteria with messaging that these are rare events. But I believe this definition diminishes the impact of mass shootings by disregarding the fact that numerous people were intentionally shot and injured, which greatly increases the documented number of mass shootings. I choose to use the former definition as it paints a more accurate picture of the realities of mass shootings, but more broadly, of gun violence.

Under this definition of mass shootings, by July 5, 2022, there had already been more than 300 mass shootings in the U.S., with the most recent one, up to that point, being the shooting at the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois. And according to the Washington Post, through July 4^th, mass shootings killed 343 people, and injured 1,391. Most troubling was that not a single week had passed without at least four mass shootings, but also consider that at the time of writing this, there have been 540 mass shootings, with the latest one happening 5 days ago, on October 15,2022, in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Mass shootings have been on the rise over the last few years. Consider how in 2019 there were 417 shootings. This steadily increased over the next two years when in 2021, there were nearly 700 incidents. What tied these shootings together was not racism or mental health; it was guns.

Mass shootings were only a piece of the gun control challenges the U.S. has. Chicago for example has experienced a number of weekends where scores of people were shot or murdered. I also started to see more rappers being robbed and murdered in the U.S. and Toronto. Yet, the gravity of the frequency of these shootings have failed to capture national headlines in the same manner that mass shootings have. Irrespective of this, there remains a gap in conversations on gun control between advocates and dissenters of stricter legislation, particularly because of the data and rights around this topic, which often conflict with the ethical concerns of gun control advocates. This contextualization of gun legislation in the U.S. and Canada, in combination with my personal experiences, have led me here, to create this series. This story is Gun Control.

As this story unfolds, my hope is to analyze the key arguments in gun legislation conversations that either show support or dissent for stricter gun legislation in the U.S. and Canada. I also hope to have a real conversation around guns in inner-cities and predominantly Black neighbourhoods to convey how and why it shapes street politics. I do this because although overarching conversations on gun control are not driven by race, there is certainly a racial component that is consistently ignored. The question here is why?

In all of these pieces my goal has always been to bridge my lived experiences with research—and if you’ve read about some of my personal experiences in other pieces, you may vaguely see my history in this area. I hope as we take this journey that it proves to be a fruitful conversation.