There's A 99 Percent Chance You'll Know A Firearm Victim In Your Lifetime

For many people hearing about gun violence, it can feel really far away ― a mass shooting on the other side of the country, a death in the home of a gun owner, the street violence described in Donald Trump’s offensive appeal to African-American voters: “You walk down the street, you get shot.” Indeed, racial segregation helps further the myth that many Americans won’t be affected by gun violence.  “Because everyday gun violence is concentrated in racially segregated neighborhoods, it’s easy for millions of Americans to think they won’t be affected,” the Guardian reported in a June investigation into American’s gun problem.  But in reality, firearm injuries and death will impact nearly every single American over the course of his or her lifetime. According to a study published this month in the journal Preventive Medicine, there’s a 99 percent chance that someone in your social network will by injured or killed by a gun over the course of your lifetime. Those statistics don’t differ much by race, with 97 percent of white Americans, 99 percent of black Americans, 99 percent of Hispanic Americans and 90 percent of people of other races knowing at least one person affected by gunfire by the time they turn 60. “When you start talking to people, you realize that everybody knows somebody who’s been injured by a gun,” said study author Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news