America under fire

Long have we known that more than 35,000 Americans are killed with guns each year, two-thirds of those suicides. In fact, there were nearly 40,000 lives lost to gun violence in 2017, a 40-year high. Too little have we focused on the grim number that typically comes after the comma in news reports, the 100,000 people in this country shot and injured annually.

A new study published in JAMA Surgery shows just how haunted by violence those millions of people are. Researchers spoke with more than 180 gunshot survivors who had been treated in a local trauma center for an injury incurred sometime after January 2008; on average, they were reached about six years after being hurt.

In addition to whatever physical injuries they struggled with, the victims had been more likely than before their injury to be unemployed and to be using alcohol or other drugs. Nearly half screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Not only were bodies scarred; lives were. New York City is an outlier, in a good way, in this sense. As murders have been driven to historic lows, shootings have fallen too. The city has suffered 47.5% fewer shooting victims these past nine years and 84% fewer over the last quarter-century. That’s thanks to brilliant, data-driven policing, robust enforcement of strict gun laws and, as of late, use of detection technology called ShotSpotter.

But there are still 820 shooting victims and counting this year, an uptick from 2018.

Every one of those men or women is walking wounded.