The impact of gun violence on the mental health of children and adolescents is multi-faceted and individualized.
James Garbarino, a professor emeritus of psychology at Cornell University and Loyola University Chicago, published an article in New England Journal of Medicine about these effects.
A fortunate finding was that the trauma aftereffects in young people resolve within a year in 85 to 90 percent of the cases. But the other 10 percent of those young people who experience long-term damage from a single violent incident are generally those whose lives have already been disrupted and otherwise traumatized.
But what about those chronically traumatized children who live in communities where violence is a regular part of daily life, rather than a single traumatic incident? Garabino observed that rarely do those children who live in such “war zone” communities receive the same “psychological first aid” or “therapeutic intervention” as the single-incident children….