In this op-ed, 17-year-old Alex King, a senior at North Lawndale College Prep High School in Chicago, explains why “hardening” schools isn’t the answer to gun violence.

I was seven years old when gun violence entered my life. It never left.

It first came when two men shot my uncle in his car. Nine years later, I was an uncle myself when my nephew was killed in 2017. Because we were the same age, Daishawn was more like my brother. We used to prank call friends and laugh until we cried. The day he was shot, he was sitting outside enjoying the spring weather. It was 75 degrees and partly sunny. He was 16.

Today, I’m a 17-year-old senior at Chicago’s North Lawndale College Prep and I’m not unique in my experience. Every youth in my community knows the sound of gunfire. Every kid has someone to march for. We’ve been ignored when we’ve asked the world to help.

Until now.

On Saturday, March, 24, I spoke at the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., before hundreds of thousands of people and millions watching from home. When I took the stage, I called them all family and I meant it: Shared trauma makes a family out of strangers.

It was one time in my life when I truly felt heard.

Another was weeks earlier when I was invited into the Parkland, Florida, home of Emma González. Emma was inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when a shooter killed 17 people on February 14. When she and her classmates began planning the march and everything that would come after, they knew it was important to reach out to kids in Chicago. After all, we’re part of the same terrible club now, but the difference is that calls for change from North Lawndale don't make the nightly news.

At Emma’s house, we resolved to fight as a family, and one of our battles as a group is against calls for the “hardening” of schools and for more policing on school grounds, calls that have been made by state legislators in Florida and President Donald Trump.

Trust me, where I’m from schools are already harder than you could imagine. We get up extra early every day to allow time to wait in line for the metal detectors. We’re disproportionately affected by zero-tolerance policies that funnel us into the school-to-prison pipeline. We already see armed police officers walking the halls and if you don’t understand why that alone can cause us stress, then you haven’t learned about the treatment of Laquan McDonald or Tamir Rice or Sandra Bland or Stephon Clark. You should.

As a proposed solution to mass shootings in schools, elected leaders want us to walk into classrooms where teachers carry loaded weapons? I challenge you to sit and learn about the history of civil rights with a clear mind while there are guns in your classroom. I challenge you to focus on studying statistics when you spend half your time trying not to become one.

I felt traumatized for years because of gun violence impacting my family and community, and when Daishawn died something inside me imploded. Nobody can prepare you for the emptiness and anger when someone you love is murdered. Even if you manage not to give up, research shows that exposure to childhood trauma affects brain development and long-term physical health.

What does that mean for my community? We are the walking wounded.