Ryane Nickens was eight years old when she saw the first bullet-riddled body.

Four years later her uncle was shot, then her pregnant sister, later her brother.

Now 43, Nickens says she's lost more than 30 people close to her to gun violence.

"I grew up with the emotional pain." Her project, the Traron Center, is a memorial to her two siblings who were shot, and the name is a combination of their first names, Tracy and Ronnie.

Here they help those affected by gun violence, especially children and young people.

They should learn to break through the culture of violence in their neighborhood.

Sofia Dreisbach

North American political correspondent based in Washington.

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When children and young people come to Nicken's project for the first time, they are tested for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“For many, the value is as high as if they lived in war zones.

And some do," says Nickens.

She means the daily handling of (armed) violence.

"I despise the word resilience." These children would have to bear the burden of a world in which adults had placed them and which those adults were doing nothing to improve.

Sometimes the children didn't want to walk home from school for fear they knew which “goals” they should stay away from.

“From a young age, they think about their mortality.

That's their reality," says Nickens.

They asked themselves: Is it even worth paying attention in school?

Is it worth learning a trade?

Massacres that left many dead this year at a Highland Park parade, at a Uvalde elementary school and at a Buffalo supermarket have received much attention, but America's gun violence problem goes far beyond such events.

Almost every day there are shots in big cities, in front of bars, in parking lots, on streets.

On Monday, July 4th, a young man shot dead seven people with a semi-automatic rifle during a National Day parade.

However, for the long bank holiday weekend, the Gun Violence Archive lists a total of 220 gun deaths;

only five out of 50 states had not reported a shot during that period.

Between Monday and Thursday morning alone, the Washington Police Department posted ten "gunshot investigations" on Twitter.

Gun violence is ubiquitous.

What are the reasons for the increase?

The website gunmemorial.org lists the names of gun victims across the United States.

The volunteer project does not claim to be complete, it lists all the dead, including those who were killed while committing a crime.

The page reads: "Certainly every case is different, but there is a common theme.

Most of those situations became fatal because a gun was available.” According to the Small Arms Survey, there were 393 million guns in the United States as of 2018.

In the meantime, the number is likely to be more than 400 million - not counting the many illegal weapons.

There is no easy answer as to why the number of shots keeps increasing.

The stress of the corona pandemic, psychological stress, housing shortages and poverty are possible factors - and simply the increasing number of guns in America.

Where there used to be fights, guns are drawn today.

This in turn has the effect that more people get guns because they fear for their safety.

A particularly large number of weapons have been proven to have been bought in recent years, for example after the shooting spree at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, the protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and after the storming of the Capitol in January 2021.