Not even witnessing or hearing gun violence but living near it may dramatically imperil the quality of life, according to the latest investigation published in the Journal of Urban Health. The new research by the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center of Rutgers University underscores the incredible toll gun violence exerts on millions of Americans not traditionally counted among its victims.
This study involved 7785 adults in nine different states, including New Jersey. It analyzed how the four forms of exposure to gun violence manifested themselves: the threat of being shot, actually being shot, having a friend or family member shot, and lastly, witnessing or hearing about shootings in the neighborhood. “For example,” lead author Jennifer Paruk, a research associate at the center, said in a statement, “the exposure item related to witnessing or overhearing a shooting in one’s neighborhood was the most frequently endorsed item and was associated with poorer quality of life on all subscales measured”.
These findings were that 37% of the respondents had at least one form of gun violence exposure. In a way, this statistic does say that over a third of the population could be exposed to one form of gun violence in states such as Colorado, Florida, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. The highest was neighborhood exposure at 22%, knowing a shooting victim at 19%, being threatened with a gun at 13%, and being shot at 12%.
Quality of life diminished almost as much from indirect exposure to gun violence as from direct victimization. In the analysis, witnessing or hearing about neighborhood shootings was linked with lower physical, psychological, social, and environmental well-being in the overall quality of life. However, this will mimic a dose-response effect: the more types of gun violence, the lower the quality of life in each domain.
In adjusted analyses, participants with all four types of gun violence exposure had an average physical QoL score of 11.14 points lower on a 0 to 100 scale compared with those with no exposure, and an average environmental QoL score of 7.18 points lower. Quality of Life in abused women was measured using the World Health Organization Quality of Life, Brief Scale; variables were controlled for income, education, prior experience of abuse, and neighborhood safety perception.
Paruk stresses that the impact of a shooting or cut-wounding blast goes beyond the directly injured, and she points out that the people indirectly exposed could greatly experience the effects in many features of their quality of life. She explained that there needed more services for support for those people indirectly affected by gun violence which is now hard to find.
The research indicates that reducing neighborhood gun violence may have widespread benefits for community health. “Reducing gun violence in particular neighborhoods would improve life for everyone in those neighborhoods,” Paruk said.
More research on the value of the survey data to follow might be to learn about how the incidence of gun violence, whether its recency and frequency may relate to health consequences. The authors feel that the results have gone to show that gun violence should be treated as an extremely generalized public health issue that affects the entire community.
In another related study, the researchers at Rutgers University had an article published in the JAMA Network Open, in which they state that direct and indirect exposures to gun violence can make adult Blacks have “lifetime suicidal ideation and behavior”. According to Daniel Semenza, the lead researcher on this study, exposure to gun violence has long-term, far-reaching implications in stress and trauma to some of the body’s most vital systems.
Suicide has been a growing statistic for the past two decades; suicide statistics are at an all-time high in the country. The increase in suicides was apparent in locations where guns were more widespread, and the rise in gun-related suicides led an uptick in overall suicides. The study analyzed 3,015 Black adults, and the demographic with the highest risk for suicidal ideation and attempts were those who had ever been threatened with a gun, or who had an individual close to them who had died by being shot. Gun violence is often something that victims are repeatedly exposed to, and poor mental health is a likely result of this.
According to Paris Davis, who is the director of intervention programs at Oakland non-profit Youth Alive, healing and therapeutic spaces are needed to educate the populations about what trauma looks like when it is held in people’s bodies and minds. He concluded that community violence has a unique, nuanced effect on everyone, and the indirect effects on the entire communities it affects are under-researched.
Semenza and other researchers are trying to make up for almost two decades lost since the halt in funding for research by the CDC. They hope to learn, along the way, how community-based interventions can help support survivors and work toward addressing the specific mental health challenges that gun violence engenders or exacerbates.
“This is not just about a couple of places and a couple of cities. This is happening regularly in every city in the U.S.,” Semenza said. “The programs can work but they have to be done right.”
“These new studies underscore, once again, the need for comprehensive approaches to address the all-too-common effects of gun violence on community health and well-being,” he said.