At about nine years old, I joined a gang.

Violence played a role in my formation as a human being.

Jose Osuna is now a civil service commissioner for the city of Long Beach.

But when he was 17.

Gun wounds landed him in the hospital.

I was shot in the knee and I was shot in the stomach.

I remember I looked up at the paramedic and I asked the paramedic, am I going to die?

And he said, I don't know.

This is actually a picture of me as a young man in the hospital after being shot myself.

You know, I'm the father of a of a murdered child.

When my son was 17 years old, he was murdered in front of my house.

Oh, no.

You know, he was He was killed by men that were looking for me and found him instead.

I miss you, Daddy.

And I love you.

Love, Moy.

That' That's.

That was what we called him.

And that's him crying.

We all are still dealing with the trauma of losing Moisés.

I got into grief counseling, but through that, I started to see all the trauma that I had gone through.

You know, I got to spend a lot of time at at a place called Homeboy Industries.

They helped me to really start to put the pieces back together of the broken me.

And so I ended up, you know, building this tremendous network.

You know, I got to go to the White House and eventually I started to really speak about the issues that I was very familiar with.

I just have to look at how incredible possibilities can be when people deal with their trauma.

When people are given resources.

Well, next week, we'll look at the myths around gun culture.

For KCET, I'm Bonnie Boswell.

Bonnie Boswell Reports is brought to you by the California Wellness Foundation.