Every shooting is horrific. Not just on South Street. – The Philadelphia Inquirer

On June 5, the day of the Pride festival in Philadelphia, I received numerous caring and concerned messages from people out of town, checking if I was still alive.

I appreciated their love and support, but it also made me uneasy.

They were responding to the rash of national news coverage of the shooting on South Street, which had happened the night before. But I wasnt on South Street that night, and live in a totally different neighborhood. Of course I was alive.

The stories kept calling it a mass shooting, and many people couldnt help but draw comparisons to what had occurred only days before in Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman shot and killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school, and the recent shooting of Black people by a white supremacist in Buffalo, N.Y.

READ MORE: Everyday gun violence goes unchecked, even as high-profile massacres capture the nations attention

Where I live in Philadelphia, I hear about deadly gunplay each and every day. I walk by endless street memorials. I stop briefly by the dusted teddy bears, the Yankee candle, and sometimes the empty Henny bottle to pay my respects to a young one taken by bullets.

Ive almost been killed, too. Ive had multiple guns pulled on me; I know how easily a moment of disagreement can lead to death.

Each incident of gun violence is horrific. But what bothered me about how people talked about the South Street shooting is that they acted like it was new or somehow more important than the gun violence that happens every day in our city.

There are summer weekends when multiple people are shot in my neighborhood, and CNN doesnt write about it.

But to Black Philadelphians, what happened on South Street is something we are practiced at sitting with. To us, it wasnt a mass shooting it was a spray shooting, instigated by an argument turned into a fight, and ending in the death of three people. The violent incident on South Street was horrific, but horrific shootings happen every day in Philadelphia, often with multiple casualties and injuries, and we dont see this kind of focus and attention.

The added impact of two recent mass shootings lent itself to the frenzy of narrative dishonesty. The shooting on South Street was not the same thing as a white supremacist doing reconnaissance, surveying the neighborhood for soft spots to enact terrorism. It also differs from the intentional hunting of children at a school.

The shooting on South Street is representative of the dynamic of disinvestment from predominantly Black neighborhoods and white supremacist cultural norms.

If you are socialized as a criminal from a young age and placed in educational institutions that decide that you are a problem before they even get to know you, it messes with your head. Couple that with poverty, remnants of redlining, and segregationist resource allocation to communities, and a culture is created where the only way to man up is to join in street economies. That comes with its own culture, code, and politics.

The trouble is that the performance of being tough doesnt go that far when everybody has a gun.

Im in proximity to shootings every day, and the overt concern that the city showed to the shooting on South Street does not align with other incidents. There are summer weekends when multiple people are shot in my neighborhood, and CNN doesnt write about it. No one texts me to see if Im OK, because they dont know that it happened. It makes me feel like my neighborhood, my neighbors, dont matter.

Im worried that the city will use this incident to justify an increase in police or some other reductionist approach to gun violence that wont work. If the city really wants to solve the problem, it should invest in community mediation (in all neighborhoods affected by gun violence) and other resources to support young people in conflict, or teach them tactics of disengagement or de-escalation.

Every incident of gun violence including on South Street is horrific. It never should have happened. I want us to invest in each other and our communities all of them so that an argument never leads to death again.

Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad is an organizer and writer born and raised in West Philadelphia. @MxAbdulAliy

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Every shooting is horrific. Not just on South Street. - The Philadelphia Inquirer