Every day, we open the paper and read about terrible murders that happen here and across our country. These tragedies can seem like an all-too-common occurrence, yet at the same time something so remote and abstract that it barely registers to the average reader.

But each name is a person who was senselessly killed. Each person is so much more than a headline: They were mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, cousins, friends. Each had his or her own unique dreams, ambitions, loves, hopes, fears, worries, joys, and disappointments, but all had this in common: each had so much life yet to live when violence took them.

These victims lived in neighborhoods. They had families and friends. They did not live in a vacuum but existed as part of the broader fabric of a community, a fragile fabric that

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