When President Joe Biden referred to an "epidemic" of gun violence on the anniversary of the Uvalde shooting, he was not simply using a rhetorical flourish. A recent KFF poll found that one out of five Americans say they have been personally threatened with a gun (the figure is one out of three for Black Americans), while one out of six say they have personally witnessed someone being shot. More than half of American adults say that either they or a family member has had a direct violent encounter with guns, and this is consistent with the documented rise in mass shootings since 2020.
Now a recent study in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine highlights an under-recognized consequence of all this gun violence: The long-term mental trauma inflicted upon the most immediate survivors, those who are actually injured by guns.
