Professor Jooyoung Lee's research was recently featured in a piece on "The Hidden Victims of American Gun Violence" published by The Atlantic Magazine. The article discusses the knowledge gap within research concerning non-fatal shooting victims and the implications of this gap for victims and their families, policymakers, and healthcare providers. The article discusses findings from Professor Lee's research on gunshot victims in Philadelphia to demonstrate the long-term health and rehabilitation issues faced by non-fatal gunshot victims. Professor Lee is a sociology professor at the U of T St. George campus. His research interests involve studying the effects of gun violence on Black male youth.
We have posted an excerpt of the article below.
Americans Don't Really Understand Gun Violence
Why? Because there's very little known about the thousands of victims who survive deadly shootings.
DAVID S. BERNSTEIN |
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The hardships facing those gravely injured in Las Vegas represent a horrific microcosm of gun violence in America generally—horrible deaths provoke widespread reaction, while the wounds of many multiples more take their toll largely unnoticed, unnumbered, and unstudied.
Fatal gun violence is often categorized in ways that make it easy to track and study. That’s how researchers know that the murder rate in the United States has declined steadily over the past three decades. But what about gun violence that does not result in death? That is far trickier to measure. That’s because nonfatal gun violence has mostly been ignored.
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Largely ignoring nonfatal shootings means that Americans are both vastly underestimating and misunderstanding gun violence. Underestimating, because researchers are only barely beginning to measure the personal, familial, local, and societal costs of what 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.
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. In order to come up with their estimate of a million shooting survivors, Kalesan and her colleagues had to rely on imperfect data from hospital emergency-room reports.
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At the University of Toronto, Jooyoung Lee is working on a similar project, writing a book based on his research tracking shooting victims in Philadelphia. Lee has observed, particularly among those shot by hollow-point bullets, that recurring pain can drive shooting victims to opioid addiction. That, in turn, can push them into dangerous situations and risky behavior as they try to feed their habit, which can lead to more trauma, incarceration, or medical intervention—all of which only compound a single gunshot’s effect on an overburdened health-care and criminal-justice system.
Read the full article here.