“While the mass shooting that killed 14 students and three staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, an hour up the road, has generated a nationwide movement and focused the spotlight on young people killed by gun violence, the violence in these neighborhoods of Miami-Dade has attracted far less media attention outside of the state. A 2015 Miami Herald investigation found that, between 2006 and 2015, an average of 30 teenagers and kids died each year from gun violence in this part of Miami-Dade.

Outside interest in West Miami-Dade’s gun-violence victims lasts about as long as a local TV channel’s evening-news chyron. As student and activist Emma González tweeted two and a half weeks after the Parkland shooting, “Those who face gun violence on a level that we have only just glimpsed from our gated communities have never had their voices heard … the way that we have in these few weeks.”

Every South Floridian has grown up seeing rear-window decals, murals, billboards, and T-shirts memorializing lost loved ones, with their birth and death dates: children, grandparents, school friends, even a beloved pet. It’s not an uncommon way to mourn, and local printing shops like Lavish—there are dozens across Miami-Dade alone—have long offered tangible, shareable mementos for the grieving and those left behind. For victims of violence or untimely passings, an artfully done R.I.P. shirt tells a simple, important story: This happened. It meant everything to us. And we are not going to forget.”

from “Their Hearts on Their Sleeves” by Adam Weinstein