Five years on from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, and something important is frequently lost in the discussion of gun violence in America. The fact is that around six out of seven people who suffer a gunshot wound will survive (excluding suicide attempts), although often with devastating long-term injuries. The result? “Americans are both vastly underestimating and misunderstanding gun violence,” writes David Bernstein for The Atlantic.
“Underestimating, because researchers are only barely beginning to measure the personal, familial, local, and societal costs of what [Bindu] Kalesan and others estimate are more than a million shooting survivors living in the United States; and misunderstanding, because nonfatal shootings can be quite different from those that result in death,” Bernstein writes.
“The dearth of research makes it near impossible to fully illustrate the realities of gun violence to the broader public. As of now, for example, nobody really knows how often people are shot by their intimate partners, how many victims are intended targets or bystanders, how many shootings are in self-defense, how such incidents affect community investment and property values, or how much it costs taxpayers to care for victims.”
“As a result, survivors of gun violence are largely invisible, even to the people who work closely on the issue—including policymakers, academics, and medical professionals.”
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“Underestimating, because researchers are only barely beginning to measure the personal, familial, local, and societal costs of what [Bindu] Kalesan and others estimate are more than a million shooting survivors living in the United States; and misunderstanding, because nonfatal shootings can be quite different from those that result in death,” Bernstein writes.
“The dearth of research makes it near impossible to fully illustrate the realities of gun violence to the broader public. As of now, for example, nobody really knows how often people are shot by their intimate partners, how many victims are intended targets or bystanders, how many shootings are in self-defense, how such incidents affect community investment and property values, or how much it costs taxpayers to care for victims.”
“As a result, survivors of gun violence are largely invisible, even to the people who work closely on the issue—including policymakers, academics, and medical professionals.”
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