Calls for community and families to help stop gun violence impacting metro Atlanta youth

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - A community is torn up over bloodshed involving metro Atlanta’s youth.

This 12-year-old boy Zyion Charles is just the latest victim.

Charles was shot and killed near Atlantic Station in Atlanta on Saturday evening.

Saturday’s shooting in midtown is now leading to calls for everyone to step up and prevent gun violence among our kids.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and Chief Darin Schierbaum held a news conference Sunday afternoon to provide updates on a deadly and violent weekend in Atlantic Station.

“To reduce the gun violence and reduce the issues that are plaguing our communities, it’s going to take everyone from corporations to parents to school teachers, principals to the Atlanta Police Department to everyone in between,” said Mayor Dickens on Sunday. “We are all here to support and help bring down the violence in our community.”

RELATED: 1 dead, 5 people injured after ‘dispute’ escalates to shooting in Atlanta.

“We got to try to put these violence prevention programs in the schools,” said Bruce Griggs.

Griggs works all year as a violence prevention advocate in metro Atlanta.

But he said ending the cycle of gun violence among kids and young adults start outside the classroom and with parents stepping up.

“They have a negative view of authority, nobody can tell them anything, these are the symptoms of the disease of violence and if you see this at an early stage, parents you have to get these kids into programs, early,” said Griggs.

The loss of a child to gun violence is all too familiar across the metro.

Sharmaine Brown started Jared’s Heart of Success in honor of her son who was killed by a stray bullet in 2015.

The nonprofit focuses on teaching youth how to de-escalate conflict when conflict arises.

Lessons that may have made a difference in Saturday’s shooting, which police say started as a dispute and escalated to gunfire.

Brown said de-escalation could’ve made a difference in her son’s case.

“It was all stemming from an altercation that could’ve been resolved peacefully.”

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