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Monday night, a gunman wearing a bulletproof vest killed five people in a southwest Philadelphia neighborhood. Two children — ages 2 and 13 — were injured.
Another shooting occurred the same night at a street festival in Fort Worth, Texas, killing three people and wounding eight.
One day earlier, in Baltimore’s Brooklyn Homes neighborhood, a shooting at a block party killed two people and left 28 injured.
These are among the 11 mass shootings — defined as acts of gun violence injuring or killing at least four people — that have occurred this month, and 346 mass shootings since the beginning of the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Mass shootings have been rising in recent years, as have other kinds of gun violence, making firearms a major public health issue. This year alone, more than 21,000 people have died due to gun violence. Of those deaths, 12,210 were suicides.
But the public health impact of gun violence extends far beyond those who are killed or injured. A far larger number of people are left grieving, traumatized, and at a risk of long-term struggles with a range of mental health issues.
“Any time a community is impacted by large-scale mass violence, the community is changed forever,” says psychologist Robin Gurwitch at Duke University. “The names of those communities are now linked to mass violence, whether it is Sandy Hook, or whether it is Oklahoma City, Columbine. There are so many.”
Studies show that people closest to gun violence, who witness it, or are injured, or who lose a loved one or an acquaintance, or even who have a loved one who was present at an incident, are at highest risk of mental health impacts, she adds.
A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that a significant number of Americans have had a direct experience of gun violence. Nearly 1 in 5 adult respondents to the poll said they’ve lost a family member to gun violence, and a similar number said they have witnessed someone being shot.
