On an unusually cold morning in March 1993, high school sophomore Edward Gillom walked out of his first-grade classroom and made his way through the crowded hallways of Harlem High School. After getting into a heated argument, allegedly over a girl, with Ronricas "Pony" Gibson and Ricoh Lee, Gillom pulled out a .38 caliber pistol and opened fire. Gillom's shots fatally wounded Gibson and left Lee with a non-fatal gunshot wound to the neck (Washington Ceasefire, 2011 pg 1). The shooting in Harlem, Georgia, garnered national attention as one of the first high school shootings and added to the alarming rates of teen gun violence during the 1990s. According to the Virginia Youth Violence Project, forty-two murders occurred in American schools in 1993 (2009 pg/par). While the rate of gun violence in American schools has declined substantially since the early 1990s, the death rate among adolescents due to firearms in the United States is still higher than in any other industrialized nation (Vittes, Sorenson, & Gilbert, 2003 pg/par ). The current generation of American teenagers has grown up surrounded by gun violence: in the news; in their video games; and in the television programs they watch. Over the past twenty years, the United States has seen an increase in gun-related crimes among adolescents; As a result, political leaders and their constituents are outraged by the way the nation's gun laws make firearms accessible to children and the mentally unstable, especially given the dramatic decline in gun control, which will inevitably lead to a increase in gun-related crimes involving teenagers and young adults. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States once said, “No free man shall be excluded from… middle of paper… since 2002 the prevalence of gun violence among adolescents in America has steadily increased since 2000 (2010 , graph 1). This “epidemic” of youth violence is most widespread and abundant in urban communities with high rates of low-income families and gang activity such as Chicago, Illinois. In their 2009 report on youth violence in Chicago Roseanna Ander, Phillip Cook, Jens Ludwig, and Harold Pollack stated that: “Over the past 50 years, our society has made far less progress in understanding how to protect our citizens from violence than from all sorts of violence." of the disease” (2009 page 1). (Wilkinson & Fagan, 2001 pg 111) In a 1993 national survey of 2,508 elementary, middle, and high school students, 60% reported that they could obtain a gun if they wanted, and one-third of the students felt that would have died young due to armed violence (Wilkinson & Fagan, 2001 page 112, table 1).