While gun trauma most certainly shapes the aftermath of shootings, it also shapes our day-to-day decisions and sensibilities far beyond specific acts of gun violence. Black boys and young men ages 15 to 34 are more than 20 times more likely to die of gun homicide than their white counterparts. More than 240,000 students (including a disproportionate number of Black students) have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine shooting, while socioeconomically underserved communities of color disproportionately bear the brunt of gun violence. This trauma has a broad toll, unevenly borne. Research has found that surviving or being exposed to gun violence survival is associated with an increased risk of symptoms linked to PTSD (including anxiety and depression) in both urban and rural contexts short-term decreases in reading ability, vocabulary and impulse control unemployment and substance use and even shifts in friendship formation - toward protection-seeking and avoidance. Having someone taken through gun violence, surviving gun violence oneself, even hearing gunshots tears at our basic sense of safety, of security and of self. Those figures by themselves are strikingly inadequate for understanding the reach of gun violence. If we understand trauma as social, psychological and physical responses to experiences that cannot be assimilated into an individual’s existing understandings of themselves and the world around them, then gun trauma goes far beyond the roughly 40,000 lives taken by gun violence every year and the approximately 115,000 people harmed by guns. Gun violence entails immediate physical trauma, but it also elicits forms of trauma that can ricochet far beyond its initial target. In the United States, people often reach for more guns as a response to mass shootings and in anticipation of needing a method of home protection, but also - as we saw in 2020 and into 2021 - in response to presidential elections, political unrest and mass-scale infectious disease. It is also not uncommon to find victims of gun violence turning to precisely the tool of their victimization - the gun - to cope in the aftermath. Americans have long turned to firearms as both a last (if not first) resort for addressing uncertainty, precarity and insecurity in a country that largely lacks a collective social safety net. Some people have approached the possibility of becoming a victim of violence, including anti-Asian hate crime, with what could be characterized as an act of anticipatory trauma: purchasing a firearm.
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Gun homicides jumped 25 percent from the year before, apparently fueled in part by a rise in intimate-partner violence. Gun violence did not go away during 2020. The second, in Boulder, Colo., occurred at a grocery store - one of the few places people still congregate during the pandemic - as some went about their shopping and others eagerly waited to be vaccinated. In the first, a gunman, acting within a broader context of anti-Asian misogyny, went to three Atlanta-area massage businesses, taking the lives of eight people. In the span of a week, two acts of public violence have stolen the lives of 18 people and provided a stark reminder of the mass gun violence that characterized the pre-Covid United States - and that looms with the end of the pandemic.