With gun violence, death isn’t the only dire outcome
His pain is constant. He has had multiple surgeries, remains on a feeding tube, and has an intravenous drip with antibiotics to stave off infection. He hasn’t been home in more than a month and can see his family only once a week.
Cooper Roberts is 8 years old and was left paralyzed by a mass shooter at a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Ill. His family isn’t sugarcoating what gun violence has inflicted on the boy physically and mentally.
“It is very hard to convince Cooper that he will be happy again,” his family wrote in a recent update on their Go Fund Me page. “Of course, we are beyond grateful for his survival, and we know others weren’t as fortunate, but we want people to know his path/our path will be a very long and hard road. He’s an eight-year-old boy who feels hopeless, sad, and angry as the reality of his life is setting in.”
This is a sorrowful refrain of gun violence not heard often enough. We rarely see or hear about the ordeals of injured survivors — their arduous recoveries and the deep wounds both visible and unseen. In their graphic candor, the Roberts family is asking us to grapple with the fact that death is not the only dire outcome in a nation saturated with guns and violence.
As a young general assignment reporter, I wrote about gun violence in Boston at a time when the city’s homicide rate was soaring. I often talked to parents as they prepared for the unnatural act of burying their murdered children. I had never talked to a survivor.
Then I met Anthony Lewis, a 16-year-old from Roxbury left partially paralyzed after he was shot in the neck. He was the youngest patient in the spinal injury unit at a VA Medical Center in West Roxbury. When his friends visited, Lewis presented himself as a cautionary tale.
“I just tell them to look at what happened to me,” he said. ”They don’t want to wind up like this, having to go through learning to walk and talk all over again.”
It’s why Lewis agreed to be interviewed. He wanted to show what a bullet had done to him. That seems to be the same intent behind the Roberts family’s harrowing posts about Cooper.
Seven people were killed in Highland Park, but dozens more at the parade were wounded, including Cooper’s mother and twin brother, Luke. No one else was as gravely injured as Cooper. According to his doctors, the bullet “entered his upper abdomen, injuring the left lobe of his liver, his esophagus near the stomach, his abdominal aorta, and exited through his back,” severing his spinal cord. Six days after the shooting, Cooper’s family told him that he was paralyzed from the waist down.
The child has battled fevers and infections. He spent nearly a month in intensive care before he was transferred to a rehabilitation facility.
After tragedies, we’re usually inundated with stories about plucky survivors smiling through adversity. They can be inspirational. But such curated resilience, only part of the story, becomes a way to distance ourselves from recognizing the harsh futures braved by gunshot victims. We walk away feeling as if everything will be all right. But those injured know better.
In 2018, New York magazine featured 27 school-shooting survivors dating back to 1946. In photos, some shed their clothes to reveal scars and outlines of surgical staples. A young man posed with his colostomy bag visible. Another has been using a wheelchair since he was shot in 2012. A survivor with bullet fragments still in his body is suffering from lead poisoning.
“I’m in a Mass Shooting Facebook group with other victims,” a survivor of a 2008 shooting at Northern Illinois University told the magazine. “When I joined, there were only a couple hundred. Now it’s almost 900.”
That was four years ago. With this nation averaging at least a mass shooting a day — defined by the Gun Violence Archive as at least four people shot or killed, not including the shooter — that number must now be higher many times over.
After 19 children and two teachers were killed in May at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, there were vigorous discussions about whether releasing crime scene photos of dead children would shock Republicans into supporting legislation to revive the assault weapons ban.
Making photos of massacred children public is cruel and unnecessary. Thousands of survivors are living examples of the horrors of gun violence.
And their numbers swell every day.
“Most people don’t witness the grueling aftermath of surviving these devastating wounds,” the Roberts family wrote.
By sharing Cooper’s difficult recovery, they are making all of us witnesses, perhaps to ensure that we won’t ignore what survivors of gun violence are never allowed to forget.