In 2020, 45,222 Americans died of gunshot wounds—the highest annual number on record and the highest per capita rate since the mid-1990s. That CDC figure reflects a surge in gun homicides and mass shootings, but it is almost certainly dwarfed by the annual number of people who get shot and survive—an estimated 76,000 based on 2016-2018 data. And even that figure fails to put the impact of gun violence on American society into its proper perspective: gun violence impacts families, friendship circles, schools, workplaces, and communities.
The first year of the pandemic, 11 million children—nearly one in five kids in the U.S.—were exposed to gun violence, with Black children 4.44 times more likely to be exposed than white children. Violent gun crime is concentrated among the most disadvantaged communities and most vulnerable Americans; in 2020, Black Americans were 12 times more likely to die by gun homicide than whites. Yet, its reach remains broad: according to Bindu Kalesan, Janice Weinberg, and Sandro Galea, every American—regardless of socioeconomic standing or demographic background—is likely to know at least one gun violence victim. “This,” they write, “should bring the issue closer to home.”
Amid these stark numbers, mental health has become a dominant narrative for explaining why gun violence happens and how to prevent it. But this perception—particularly prevalent in coverage of mass shootings—is just wrong: people with mental illnesses are not disproportionately likely to engage in gun violence but, if anything, are more likely to become victims themselves. Even worse, this narrative buries the real link between gun violence and mental health: gun violence is not just killing and wounding our bodies but also harming and hampering our selves at a scale that has yet to be fully reflected in our national debates about gun violence.
Even without a physical trace, exposure to gun violence can be detrimental to well-being. While exposure to any kind of violence can have mental health effects, there is evidence that violence committed with a gun is especially impactful, especially among African Americans and women. Direct gun violence exposure—witnessing gun violence, hearing gun shots, or having a loved one killed by guns—results in higher levels of anger, violent behavior, sleep disturbances, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and other symptoms associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. For youth, gun violence exposure is correlated with other kinds of victimization, aggravating post-traumatic stress symptoms.
Among children and young adults, indirect gun violence exposure—the gun shots or homicides that happen in one’s local community, even if one does not see or hear them directly—impairs reading and vocabulary skills, lowers standardized test performance, and increases anxiety and depression, especially for girls. Similarly, studies on the mental health impacts of mass shootings show that these tragedies have community-level implications that far exceed the direct exposure experienced by victims and witnesses. Hearing, seeing, and knowing that gun violence can and does happen in their communities, kids are afraid, sad, and upset. Even though there are huge gaps in what we know about how gun violence shapes mental health—for example, little is known about the long-term mental health impacts of gun violence exposure with respect to mental health—one finding is clear: hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. are at risk every year of experiencing traumatic responses to gun violence exposure.
Not Just a Gun Violence Problem; It’s a Gun Trauma Problem
Trauma is typically understood as a psychological condition, as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration defines it: “individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.” In The Politics of Surviving, sociologist Paige Sweet notes that dominant approaches to trauma reflect a recognition of the breadth of harms that result from traumatic experiences. However, too often, psychological approaches to trauma individualize and medicalize harm, obscuring how social conditions make harm possible, and in doing so, it places the burden of addressing those harms on individuals—rather than on society.
As a way to reframe American conversations about gun violence, gun trauma can help us better grasp the full impact of U.S. gun violence—but doing so requires that we reckon with trauma as both a psychological and a sociological phenomenon. Scholarship on gun violence and its aftermath reveal that trauma is far from simply a psychological construct that explains the inner lives of individuals struggling to cope. Embedded in and interacting with social structures of inequality, trauma is both psychologically singular and socially patterned; it is experienced not just by individuals but also by communities. Recognizing that “trauma can manifest at the community level, yet most frameworks address trauma only at an individual level,” one team of qualitative researchers led by public health scholar Ijeoma Opara documented the lived experiences of Black and Latinx youth living in an under-resourced, high-violence community. They found that not just individuals but also communities themselves exhibited traumatic “symptoms,” creating the conditions for the people within them to feel “a disconnect from their community, an unnatural fear of their environments, feelings of hopelessness, and norms regarding risky behaviors practiced by their peers.” Ethnographers such as Jooyoung Lee, Laurence Ralph and Jon Rich (a doctor by training), who have tracked the aftermath of gun violence, have likewise revealed the incompleteness of psychological accounts of gun trauma that emphasize individual-level cognitive skills or behavior responses: gun trauma appears in the form of precarious and/or intermittent employment, housing instability, chronic medical problems (and the hospital bills that follow), legal cynicism, social isolation, and also—as Ralph in particular emphasizes—resilience.
Put differently, gun trauma is always a personal tragedy, but it is also, at least in the U.S. context, a social catastrophe. Findings from my own ongoing research on gun violence survivors, funded by the National Science Foundation, also reflect this. My research draws on in-depth interviews with gun violence survivors, broadly defined: people who have witnessed shootings or have been present at mass shootings, people who have been shot and survived, and people who have had a loved one killed. For most of the gun violence survivors I have interviewed so far, it is not possible to disentangle the psychic trauma of gun violence from the social trauma it exacts. The survivors I have interviewed often express profound alienation from a criminal justice system that operates on behalf of the state’s interests rather than on behalf of survivors and often report further psychic harm on account of their interactions with the police, the courts, and the prison system. They recount how the experience of gun violence exacerbates already existing insecurities with regard to housing and employment. They have described the destruction of family ties—whether formally, through custody battles, or informally, through the strain families experience amid gun trauma. Many have described the political system—particularly its unwillingness to proactively address gun violence—as profoundly and personally distressing, depressing, and demoralizing. And several have explained how the media—whether by distorting their words, misrepresenting facts surrounding their case, or simply reporting on gun violence as yet another headline story–have exacerbated the impact of the gun violence they have directly experienced.
Their experiences reveal a society that not only allows gun violence to occur but largely leaves it to survivors to navigate its aftermath on their own. Gun trauma reveals that what uniquely distinguishes the U.S. is not simply the prevalence of gun violence but also the indifference, insensitivity, and striking lack of support that survivors often encounter as they navigate the afterlife of gun violence. Most of the social response to gun violence—the typical terms in which we publicly debate gun violence, the often haphazard and indifferent responses from employers and landlords, the fact that most support, if it exists, comes in the form of therapy—rests on the presumption that gun violence is, fundamentally, an individual loss. This social response reflects a broad cultural aversion to grief, death and loss in the United States that ends up leaving most people unable to manage their own trauma or the trauma of others, which in turn disproportionately burdens women, particularly women of color, with managing their own grief and the grief of others. This means that socioeconomic disadvantage shapes not just who becomes a gun violence survivor but also how gun violence is survived. Those gun violence survivors I interviewed with robust social networks, with a secure financial foundation, with access to health care, especially mental health care, and/or who live in a jurisdiction with a criminal justice system responsive to the public it serves will never fully recover the life they had “before” gun violence, but they do not report the same impacts from gun violence as survivors who were already socially isolated, who already were experiencing socioeconomic precarity, who lacked access to adequate housing, employment and health care, and/or who experience the criminal justice system as punitive rather than protective.
Understanding gun trauma as both psychological and sociological, as public health scholar Ijeoma Opara’s team invite us to do, fundamentally alters not just how we understand the problem of gun violence but also what we think we can do about it. And it raises a crucial question: What would it look like if the gun debate centered the experiences of gun violence survivors? As one gun violence survivor told me, one of the most profound lessons of surviving gun violence is this: gun violence represents not just an individual pain but also—to the extent that we share the society in which we live, love, and heal—a loss for all of us. The gun violence survivors I interviewed wanted polices that would prevent what happened to them from happening to anyone else: the act of gun violence itself and also the bewildering aftermath of it. In other words, they wanted prevention, and they also wanted the kinds of support that heal people and places—that is, structural reform as well as therapeutic support. (One criminologist—Jack Devitt—notes that his “dream law” would include something largely left out of national debates about gun law: a fund for supporting gun violence victims, although few states have taken up the federal funding that is available.) Such survivor-centered initiatives are necessary if we wish to transform the U.S. from a society of survivors (that which we already, overwhelmingly and tragically, are) to a survivor society—that is, a society that recognizes that gun trauma is psychological and sociological, and supports and uplifts survivors accordingly.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
