“What did you see once you got shot?” That might not be one of the first things victims of gun violence are asked, but it was the first question Access Living asked in a survey used to address and assess the many difficulties survivors of gun violence faced.
The nation’s gun violence crisis continues to be a significant threat to people’s lives, as it has claimed over 10,000 lives in the United States every year for the past 10 years, according to Gun Violence Archive. Only three months into 2025, there have been over 100 shootings reported in Chicago, and this will probably continue to rise, as in the country in 2023, on average, 118 people died of gun violence a day. According to the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, for every person who dies due to gun violence, more than two survive, usually with significant lifelong physical injuries that they have to learn to live with, along with the mental trauma of the incident.
They can suffer from losing their ability to walk, hold jobs, and being able to live a normal life. Several organizations are stepping into this space to provide the services they need since they’re so limited.
In 2022 and 2023, Access Living conducted over 100 interviews with gun violence survivors to hear what barriers they experienced firsthand. They also interviewed government officials, community-based organizations, violence prevention leaders, and staff of hospital trauma centers to hear what they’ve seen working with survivors. Shared experiences among survivors included difficulties in accessing and attaining healthcare and mental health resources, as well as accessible and affordable housing, transportation, and education necessary for employment. They also reported facing stigma, disability, and racial discrimination, and social isolation without the support to rebuild and heal their lives.
Through the study, they were able to identify ways to help fix the gaps they were dealing with, using their experiences to inform the development of a program tailored to their needs. By conducting one-on-one and group interviews, Access Living’s community strategy specialist Candace Coleman and Michelle Garcia, manager of organizing and community development, asked a variety of questions to understand what was lacking for each interviewee. Some key components include personal care, the need for medical supplies, and mental health support. The program will involve identifying and working with survivors through different outlets, including the hospital setting, nursing home setting, and the community, by using community organizations and word of mouth to identify survivors at any age and area of recovery.
For personal care, survivors stated the need to have someone come to their house and help them do their daily activities that involve moving, like dressing, cleaning their home, meal prep, or just having someone there to help them move around and get things done. When they’re injured, there is a chance they will need a wheelchair, walker, cane, crutches, etc., or they might need a different type of supplies, like a urinal, for example. “That’s usually what they would need, or other medical supplies, medical equipment, then also mental health support,” Garcia says. “This has been a very traumatic experience for folks, being shot, becoming disabled, and having to adjust, so that was a gap that has been seen. No mental health support whatsoever, not just for them, but for the family members.”
With mental health support for victims, there’s even less support for youth who survive gun violence, especially in marginalized communities. “They need more access to professionals, especially in the Black and Brown community, who look like them, have similar shared experiences, and can relate to them,” says Leslie Helmcamp, Lurie Children’s Hospital’s director of violence prevention initiative, “I think they’re out there, but it’s more about focusing on a pipeline of who can support and provide mental health services for youth.”
Lurie Children’s Hospital piloted a hospital-based violence intervention program in 2023, where two social workers worked with youth survivors of violence-related injuries to provide them with the correct care and services. This includes victims of other types of violence, including stabbing and sexual assault. The program continues to this day and provides coordination and referrals to community-based services such as counseling and therapy, substance use treatment, victim crime services, life skills coaching, mentoring, case management, and recreational and workforce development to children between the ages of zero and nineteen. Social workers work with the families to assess the issue and make sure there aren’t any immediate threats to the child’s safety, and do some safety planning if there are, so it doesn’t become a violent act again. From there, they try to get to know the family, what the family’s and survivors’ needs are, specific goals for their plan to recover, and make sure they feel supported to be able to heal and hopefully prevent them from getting injured again.
Access Living, a non-profit organization based in Chicago, provides services and tries to break down barriers for people with disabilities while protecting their civil rights and challenging stereotypes, is one of the partner organizations that helped launch this program at Lurie. They have partnerships with BUILD Inc., Chicago Police Department Crime Victim Services, Communities United, Cook County Public Defender’s Office, Reclaim 13, UCAN, youth outreach services, and youth/parent representatives. They joined their planning team to contribute to designing and developing the program to make sure they were thinking of all the ways they could support the survivors and their families.
Once the social worker at Lurie meets with the youth and their family and learns exactly what they need, the hospital keeps in constant contact with them for six months if the family would like them to be involved for that long. As this program has been moving along, they’ve noticed that once families get placed in mental health services or therapeutic services, whether it be at Lurie Children’s or externally, they might be ready to navigate the world on their own, so they don’t need those consistent check-ins. Since it has been running for less than two years, they’re still learning about the duration of help that people might be interested in having, and it sometimes depends on the type of injury or if the threat is still there.
Access Living provides the support and training needed for the social workers at Lurie’s Children’s Hospital who deliver care, train new staff, and consult.
Gun violence survivors are different from disabled people who’ve had their disabilities for many years. “They might be newer to being a survivor of gun violence, and with that, we’re assisting them in identifying services that they might need. Helping them identify as a survivor and someone new to the disability community, what they need to live independently, and what kind of support they need in place,” says Access Living senior manager Katie Blank.
Access also connects them with a fellow survivor who has gone through something similar. Doing so helps build a connection with someone who can provide additional resources and guidance based on their own experiences.
According to Blank, the goal is to help survivors increase their independence, rights, and autonomy. This includes information and referrals, resources, connecting services, peer mentorship, and assistance with the specific services and resources the survivor needs. While running a mentoring group for survivors of gun violence, that will be run by a survivor. From there, they’ll identify if there are specific types of mentoring groups that they’re interested in. Like providing a youth-based, youth-led mentoring or female-based, female-led mentoring. Which means either leading them internally or finding external mentoring groups for people who will be interested.
The program continues to evolve in response to what it has learned. For example, many gun violence survivors might prefer mentor groups that meet in the evenings or virtually. In addition, it has added resources based on what people have requested, such as affordable housing, accessible housing, and guidance on making accessibility modifications to existing housing.
Just as they interviewed survivors to determine how they wanted to navigate this program, they will also conduct interviews and surveys with attendees to gather their goals and expectations for participating in these groups. Whether that means referring them over to Chicago Cred, an anti-gun organization, or the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, if they need job coaching or job placement, since Access Living doesn’t help with employment. Or sending them to an organization that specifically helps with housing accommodations, since many people live on the second and third floors and will need to be moved to the first floor, obtain a ramp or access to an elevator, or have things installed in their space to help them get around. According to Blank, “It would be identifying what they need and then referring them, connecting, and creating that relationship.”
Morgan Bruner is a journalism student at Columbia College Chicago, entering her junior year in the fall. With two years under her belt, Morgan has covered various topics, including gun violence.
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Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.