Opinion | How to Fix the Debate Over Guns - The New York Times - 0 views
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We can find real solutions to gun violence if we recognize the trauma it causes.
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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
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Gun violence did not go away during 2020. Gun homicides jumped 25 percent from the year before, apparently fueled in part by a rise in intimate partner violence
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In the U.S., 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.
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Gun violence entails immediate physical trauma, but it also elicits forms of trauma that can ricochet far beyond its initial target
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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
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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
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Research has found that surviving or being exposed to gun violence survival is associated with an increased risk of symptoms linked with 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
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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
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Policies that purport to end the trauma of gun violence by increasing the punitive surveillance of individuals with mental illness, increasing police presence and surveillance of students at schools, or bringing more people into contact with the criminal justice system may ultimately create more, if different, trauma.
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Gun trauma is implicated in how guns harm us, why we turn to guns, and — to the extent that we depend on punitive criminal justice approaches to address it — how we attempt to solve the problem of gun violence.
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We must dismantle this trauma-violence cycle, and the first step is centering gun trauma within the gun debate and addressing gun violence
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what this might look like: the Community Justice Action Fund and Revolve Impact’s By Design campaign, which aims to “change the conversation” on gun violence by elevating leaders of color to “interrupt systems of violence and ultimately build power for communities most impacted by gun violence”