Gary Fields
The Wall Street Journal

Murders of African-American teenagers have risen 39% since 2000 and 2001, according to a report due out Monday.

Homicides in which blacks ages 14 to 17 years old were the victims rose to 927 over the two-year period of 2006-07, the last years for which statistics are available, compared with 666 during 2000-01, according to the study by criminal-justice professors at Boston’s Northeastern University. The 39% increase is much greater than the rise in overall homicides, which jumped 7.4% from 2000-01 to 2006-07.

Murders rose among black teens in 2006 and 2007 as overall homicides dropped compared with the previous year. And the 2000-07 rate of increase among black teens was more than twice the rate of increase among white teens, the study found.

The data confirm a pattern identified earlier this year by The Wall Street Journal, which found that while most communities in the U.S. were seeing a decline in homicides, many African-American neighborhoods were continuing to see an increase.

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Ronald Holt, with his son Blair

Ronald Holt
Blair’s father

It’s been nearly a year since gun violence took my son.

He was shot while jumping in front of gun fire, protecting a friend who was in harm’s way. Blair was a smart, good and loving young man. This was supposed to be the year we picked out a University, talked about girlfriends and watched his talent take off.

But since he was killed May 10th of last year, his mother, Annette and I made our son a promise. Do everything we can to stop gun violence. We can’t do this alone. There are far too many kids getting killed in our communities.

Please help me by taking action against this senseless gun violence. Congressman Bobby Rush has sponsored House bill 2666, dubbed “Blair’s Bill” which works to have people register their gun purchases into a federal database, helping track down those guns involved in crimes.

Please log onto these websites to learn how to get involved.

www.Purposeoverpain.org

www.commonsensesaveslives.org

Myspace page

We can’t do this alone.
It was our son who lost his life to senseless gun violence, it could be yours tomorrow.

Sandra L. L. Bloom, co-author of 'Bearing Witness: Violence and Collective Responsibility' shares her thoughts on young people and violence.

Sandra Bloom, MD
Linda Rich, MA
Theodore J. Corbin, MD
John A Rich, MD, MPH
The Center for nonviolence and Social Justice
Drexel University School of Public Health

With the number of killings reported in the news, it can be easy to lose sight of all the young people in the inner city who make up the “walking wounded.” Violence is contagious. Community violence affects everyone in the community - and that means all of us. Many young people in the inner city have been victims of nonfatal violence - shot, stabbed or assaulted. Many others have witnessed violence against their friends or family, endured graphic, daily news reports about neighborhood violence or been treated as perpetrators, even when they are not.

Sometimes the trauma that these young people go through leaves them feeling raw and unsafe and even threatened by their own peers. We now know a great deal about the science of trauma. Over the past 20 years the scientific community has accumulated a vast store of knowledge about how the brain and the body are negatively affected by repetitive violence. In many ways, urban youth become like the traumatized veterans who return from Afghanistan and Iraq whose bodies and minds are stressed to the point where they cannot distinguish between real and imagined threat.

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Watch CNN's David Mattingly report on Blair Holt, one of 28 Chicago school kids murdered last year.

David Mattingly
360° Correspondent

I first met Ronald Holt about a year ago. He had recently lost his young son Blair, to a wave of violence that was tearing through the streets of Chicago’s southside. Blair Holt was an innocent bystander caught in a gang-related shooting on a city bus. He was killed while pulling a classmate out of harm’s way. His death became a rallying point for neighborhoods demanding tighter gun laws, more economic opportunity for young people and better parenting.

Ronald Holt was one of the people leading the charge. Instead of becoming consumed by grief, he turned it into a weapon. He lobbied the state legislature hoping to restrict gun sales and he has since attended hundreds of public rallies and memorials. I returned to Chicago to find Holt at one of these rallies and I learned he has a new enemy…despair. The past year has produced very few victories.

Holt tells me he finds strength by talking to his departed son and imagines the teen encouraging him to keep going. He needs the pep talk often. So far this school year 24 students from Chicago Public Schools have been killed. That is a rate even faster than what we saw last year.

Program Note: Watch David Mattingly’s report Friday 10p et on 360°

Enough desks to fill a classroom sat empty in a downtown plaza Tuesday, each bearing a pair of sneakers and representing one of 20 Chicago Public Schools students killed by gunfire this school year. (AP)

On Monday morning, March 31, I visited Simeon Career Academy in the wake of another senseless shooting of a teenager. This one took the life of Chavez Clarke, a young man who on March 29 was attending Saturday classes at Simeon to try to work toward graduation. He was gunned down in the school’s parking lot shortly after finishing classes.

As I talked with students on Monday, I was struck by their sense of outrage over the prevalence of guns in their lives and by their passion to do something about it. Led by Simeon junior Ronnie Mosley, the school quickly organized 10 busloads of students to attend an anti-violence rally that was being organized for the next day in downtown Chicago by Father Michael Pfleger, the pastor of St. Sabina Church who has been a tireless advocate for stronger gun-control laws.

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