Last Friday was the 10th anniversary of Wear Orange Day, a day to promote gun violence awareness.

Survivors and those who lost loved ones to guns gathered in Lexington to call for an end to gun violence.

Too many killing one another.

Youth using a gun against a brother.

Too many mothers losing a son.

The grandmother of Tyler Williams, who was murdered in 2017.

We have a history in our family of people being killed, murdered by gun.

My grandmother's mother, my grandmother's brother.

My grandmother's son.

And it goes on.

And then there's Tyler.

And there was my grandmother's sons son.

That's no history that anybody wants to bear.

I grew up in eastern Kentucky, and it was there on January 18th, 1993, that I experienced the gun violence that forever altered the course of my life.

On that day, a classmate walked in.

Later in this classroom and shot and killed our English teacher, Diana McDavid, and the school custodian, Marvin Hicks.

He then held us hostage for nearly half an hour before letting us go and turning himself in to the authorities.

My former classmate into two lives that day and radically changed the lives of 22 others.

There were 22 kids in that class that lost all sense of safety and security they will ever know.

The cycle got it.

And we got to love on our babies.

I lost my son, Shawn Howard, in 2017.

August 5th, almost eight years ago.

While our case was solved, our perpetrator was found not guilty.

So every day we live with these.

Remember that our loved ones are not here with us.

Shawn will be forever 19.

He would have been 27 this year.

But he will be forever.

19.

My son was William Cole or Joshua.

He was murdered in 2020 to May the 22nd.

I didn't think I was going to be able to make it through May.

So you go through May you go through Mother's Day.

There's nothing like being a mother with no child.

You have no child because somebody decided to take a gun and murder yours.

So I feel a certain type of way every day.

We need art to fit all of us.

Praying for single moms and kids, dealing with trauma, gunshots at night.

It's hard to dream when insomnia.

A lot of times when you're a gun violence survivor or you have a loved one that's killed by gun violence.

You're the elephant in the room.

It's the stairs.

It's the people looking at you and poorness.

You know that They don't know how to speak to you on what's happened to you.

One of the most detrimental things you can go through.

One of our speakers said today, their heart hurts.

Your heart hurts every day when you lose a loved one.

Any time you lose a loved one.

But when you know that someone has taken that loved one from you, it's something different because it's out of your control.

It's out of your power.

So to have our community step up and be behind us and stand with us and say, Hey, we're going to join this fight with you so nobody else has to go through it.

It really impact our lives and helps us know that we're not alone in this journey because we do walk it alone.

A lot of times.

The entire month of June is National Gun Violence Awareness Month.