As of June 1, the Gun Violence Archive, an independent research group, reports that there have been 268 mass shootings in the U.S. in 2023. (Per the GVA, a mass shooting is defined as any incident in which four or more people are shot and wounded or killed.) The first mass shooting this year occurred in Miami Gardens, Florida, where nine people were shot just after midnight on New Year’s Day. A toddler was wounded. No fewer than five shootings followed within the next 24 hours. One person died in Mifflin Township, Ohio; four were injured. Two people were killed and four were injured in Ocala, Florida. In Chicago, a teenager was killed. He was 17. Three others were injured; all of them were under 18.
There have since been dozens more. The breaking-news alerts blaring updates from massacres at schools and banks and houses of worship and malls and parades and concerts make up just a fraction of the total. There are small, wrenching vigils that never make the news. There are funerals and protests that leave behind a headline or two and broken parents. Schools email families about a dead student or a dead teacher. Facebook laments the death of an old classmate. You have scrolled past this kind of news. It would be impossible not to. There is just too much of it. In the following pages, you will read about the experiences of 10 people who have been directly affected by gun violence—and what their lives are like now. Two are mothers whose children were shot and killed. Three lost a best friend to gun violence. One is entering the sixth grade. She likes to listen to Olivia Rodrigo. When she has to endure active-shooter drills at school, she prefers to wear noise-canceling headphones. The hope is that their stories, at once vastly different but with themes that echo one another throughout, serve as a reminder: We cannot become numb.
The morning we started to reach out to the people whose stories are featured here, there was a mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville. Six people were killed; three of them were children. After the shooting, Republican representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee told Capitol Hill reporters of the gun-violence epidemic, “We’re not gonna fix it.”
But across the country, there are people determined to prove Burchett wrong. Ten states have passed assault-weapons bans, including Washington in late April. Most were approved before the expiration of a federal assault-weapons ban—which Congress approved in 1994 and let lapse in 2004. For the decade that the ban was enforced, the likelihood of being killed in a mass shooting was 70 percent lower than it is now, according to a 2019 study by researchers at the NYU School of Medicine.
Many pundits will insist that that kind of legislation would fail now, but we do know this: It would be popular. A recent Fox News poll found that an overwhelming majority of Americans—Democrats and Republicans—wants an expansive set of gun-control measures, from criminal background checks to raising the legal age to purchase firearms. More than 60 percent of voters support an assault-weapons ban.
So is Burchett right, that it’s all inevitable, despite what we tell our lawmakers we need? Does indifference become a self-fulfilling prophecy? The people whose lives gun violence has torn apart refuse to let it come true.
Caitlyne Gonzales
Caitlyne Gonzales survived the 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed, and 17 more people were wounded. Gonzales knew all the victims and lost her best friend, Jackie Cazares, in the massacre. She just turned 11.
I’ve been part of school walkouts, and I’ve given a lot of speeches. A couple weeks before a speech, I’ll write down what I want to say, and I’ll try to tell people why it is important to end gun violence. It sometimes feels overwhelming, but I like it.
When I talk in front of a lot of people, I take deep breaths and remember why I want to be an advocate to end gun violence. I go to an EMDR therapist, and we talk about breathing. We talk about trauma and how to cope with things. It’s nice to have someone to talk to. I get frustrated with adults. Grown-ups are not protecting us or preventing more mass shootings from happening. I wish [Senator] Ted Cruz and Governor [Greg] Abbott would listen to me.
When I’m feeling sad, I like to sit by myself in my room. I have a Spotify playlist, and I listen to that to feel better. Olivia Rodrigo is on it, and I like Cody Johnson and Bad Bunny. I like that I get to travel and meet people. That also makes me feel better.
I like when I meet other gun-violence survivors. I talk to the kids from Oxford, Parkland, Santa Fe, El Paso. I have a lot of their numbers, and I still keep in touch with them. We talk about stuff. I’m texting four of them from Oxford right now. My friends make me smile. We like to talk and hang out. It’s my birthday soon, and I’m inviting my friends for a sleepover at a cabin. We’re going to do an all-nighter and stay up. We’ve got games and there’s a pool. And there’s a basketball court!
I sometimes still feel anxious when I have drills at school. We’re having one soon, and it’s hard. I get my noise-canceling headphones when I know one is coming, and I put them on before it starts. Some of the teachers are nice about it, and some aren’t. The nice teachers comfort us. They hug us. But one time, we had a shelter-in-place drill and everybody started freaking out and crying. Afterward, the teacher kept going and started doing her lesson, even though everybody was crying.
I want to tell people that gun violence is preventable. Keep going to protests. Talk to your lawmakers in your state and tell them we need to pass a bill to raise the age to obtain an assault weapon. We can make it happen.
Gabby Giffords
Gabby Giffords is the cofounder of Giffords, a nonprofit gun-violence- prevention organization, and a former congresswoman who was shot in 2011 while meeting with constituents in Tucson. Six people, including a member of her staff, were killed in the shooting.
We don’t talk enough about the trauma inflicted by gun violence: on people who are shot and survive, on those who lose loved ones, and on entire communities that experience an act—or repeated acts—of gun violence. I’ve been impressed beyond measure by the courage, resilience, and passion of the survivors I’ve had the privilege of working with.
I still believe in the possibility and the power of bipartisan compromise. We all want our children to be safe at school, at the movies, at concerts, at the grocery store. We may disagree on how to get there, but people are fed up with the status quo and are demanding action. Like my own recovery journey, progress doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen without setbacks. But I truly believe it’s within our reach.
Brandon Wolf
Brandon Wolf survived the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where 49 people were killed and 53 more were wounded. Wolf lost two of his closest friends in the massacre. He has since become a public speaker and a gun-safety and LGBTQ+ civil-rights advocate. His memoir, A Place for Us, will be out this summer.
The shooting happened on a Saturday night—early Sunday morning. I think all LGBTQ people live with the fear of having their sense of belonging ripped away. I’m also a Black man in America, so my personal sense of safety has always felt fragile. But even if you’re imagining a world where you’re constantly under the threat of violence or discrimination or hate, nothing will prepare you for the moment when your universe is shattered in such a violent, horrific, public fashion.
My best friend, Drew Leinonen, was killed. Drew was one of the first people I ever met who loved me unconditionally. I didn’t know what to expect from that kind of love, but he showed it to me time and time again until I learned that I was deserving of it. When we got to his funeral, with him having been ripped away so suddenly at such a young age, I was in a state of shock and trauma. His mom had asked me to be a pallbearer, and as I was helping to push the casket down the aisle, I found myself holding on really tightly. My knuckles were turning white. I realized I did not want to let go until I found the right words to say goodbye.
We got to the front of the church, and I looked down at the casket, and I whispered a promise to him, impromptu. I said, “I will never stop fighting for a world that you would be proud of.”
Not long after Pulse—either Sunday night or Monday night—another gay bar in town had a benefit night, with the proceeds going to a victims’ relief fund. I went with my friends, even though it made me uncomfortable. I wanted to send a message to other LGBTQ people in the community that we were not going to hide because of this. We were not going to let one act of hate tear us apart.
I didn’t expect it, but there was something so liberating about standing in that space, in the middle of the dance floor—the music raging underneath our feet. It was a way for us to declare, even so soon after it happened, that our joy still matters.
X González
X González survived the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Seventeen people were killed, and 17 more were wounded. González became a leading voice in the gun-violence- prevention movement with their powerful speech “We Call B.S.” In 2018, they were instrumental in organizing the historic March for Our Lives protest in Washington, D.C.—the largest student-led demonstration in American history. González recently graduated from New College of Florida.
From day one, I realized I had to be a nuisance if I wanted to make a difference. I learned what government looks like and how that impacts the average person. The people who get stuff done are the people who are “a problem.” The people who speak up, who needle their local congressperson, who know their communities well—those are the people who make change.
Over time, we started to see how politicians would tell us things in meetings and commiserate with us and then vote against the things that we were pushing. It was incredibly disheartening, especially because we were trying to create some rapport, and then we’d just be nowhere with them. That’s when we would start to push and be more firm and aggressive. I’d start to tell people, “Hey, I totally understand where you’re coming from. It must be so hard to have to take so much money from the NRA every day. Now can you please put laws in action that will save the lives of thousands of people annually and hundreds daily?”
These exchanges are deeply frustrating. I will say that very clearly. You learn to mitigate your expectations and dreams right before walking through someone’s office door. You need to know and understand what this person could do in a best-case scenario and a worst-case scenario. You have to know what’s realistic. It took me a long time to realize that. I tell activists now, “If you need to step away, that’s very much allowed.” But I also want to tell politicians to remember that you work for us. We’re your bosses. It’s fine to be polite, but sometimes to make a statement and to be heard, people need to be loud and show a united front and not be too nice. We’re raised in this world where teachers and parents tell us that when we speak to our elders, when we talk to someone older than us, especially a person with power, we need to be gracious. We need to monitor ourselves. But when it comes to politicians, I don’t know if that’s true. Politicians have the power to impact all of us. And if they’re not wielding that power correctly, why should I not tell them that what they’re doing is bad? Why should I tiptoe around the issue? And who gets called aggressive? Who is called ungracious? It’s people of color, trans and queer people, people for whom these issues are personal. When we used to meet with politicians, people would tell us to “take the emotion out” of our voices. But I’m never going to censor the truth so that people can feel better about themselves.
At the end of the day, if we don’t like what elected leaders have been doing, we can vote against them. We didn’t start that conversation when it came to gun violence, but we were able to bring that conversation into the public conversation. Candidates get asked at presidential debates now about gun violence and mass shootings because of us. That’s so vital. Candidates have to face the fact that we are the laughingstock of the world because of this. People are like, “Look at America! Those idiots!” It’s so embarrassing.
Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost
Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost is a former organizer and community activist now representing central Florida and his hometown of Orlando as the first member of Gen Z ever elected to Congress.
After Sandy Hook, it started to feel like we were having more shooter drills than fire drills. I was in high school. I would be at a jazz-band concert, looking over my shoulder at the exits, wondering if someone was going to come in and shoot up the auditorium. It was like, if someone could do this to little kids, then someone could do this to me.
These events compound. We had that shooting, and then there were others: Parkland and Santa Fe and Uvalde. It creates an environment where people are scared. Kids are worried about going to school. That fear isn’t represented in Congress because most folks don’t understand what it’s like to have a childhood that’s never free of the threat of gun violence.
I didn’t think about running for office until local people started bringing it up. It started to feel like I needed to run, as someone who is part of the mass-shooting generation, because politicians were telling people, “There’s nothing we can do about it.” A lot of members of Congress are complacent because most of them don’t have firsthand experience with the horrors of gun violence. That’s true even among well-intentioned Democrats. Mass shootings account for around 1 percent of all gun violence. I tell people that not to diminish mass shootings but because I want people to close their eyes and think about how big of a deal mass shootings are, how horrible they are, how much devastation they cause, how much life they take. And then I want people to know [mass shootings] are 1 percent of the total problem.
Recently, I announced my first bill, which would create an Office of Gun Violence Prevention within the Department of Justice. That day, I had lunch with the family of T’Yonna Major, a nine-year-old who was shot and killed in her own bedroom here in my community. I’m sitting with the family, and everyone’s laughing and talking about T’Yonna. And one by one, I see people just kind of stare off in the distance. I can see it hitting them. They break down, and you see it happen with each one of the family members. I’ve been witnessing that for the past decade: people realizing that someone they love is never coming back.
Brandon Tsay
Brandon Tsay survived the Monterey Park, California, shooting in January of this year. Eleven people were killed, and nine more were injured. Tsay disarmed the shooter at Lai Lai Ballroom & Studio, which his grandparents founded, preventing further casualties.
Before the shooting, I wasn’t even sure, if I was met with a gun, what would I do? A lot of people have wondered about that, but when it happens, it’s very different. You realize that it can’t be planned out. There are too many variables. You can’t think; it’s instinct.
In retrospect, I’m glad I was there because I know how much worse things could have gotten. It does feel like a miracle, but I don’t know how to relate to the version of me that people saw on the news. People have called me a hero and told me how brave I was, and I am proud of what I did—don’t get me wrong. But people putting me on this pedestal, idolizing me? I just don’t know how to live up to that. People have to realize that I am a human being. I have problems. I’m a person. It’s a lot to deal with. Before the shooting, there was a stigma around therapy for me. I thought people didn’t need therapy unless they had severe mental problems. Now that I’ve experienced therapy, I know that stigma is untrue. Therapy is for everyone—everyone facing difficult decisions, everyone confronting difficult events in their lives. In the Asian community in particular, a lot of people are wary. There’s this sense that we have to hold things in and not let our families down by reaching out to others, by “gossiping.”
I see now that therapy is necessary, especially in America, where people are so isolated. It just breeds this sense of impotence, like nothing matters. The laws we have around guns are too lenient, but the culture needs to change too so that people get help and aren’t driven to perform these acts of violence.
Since the incident, I’ve been working hard on healing. I still feel a bit anxious and on edge—kind of paranoid when it comes to being out in public spaces. It’s so immoral that we do this to our fellow humans. We’re all the same species. Is this what we have become?
Rep. Lucy McBath
Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia is an author and advocate, but the most important title she will ever hold is “Jordan’s mom.” In 2012, McBath’s 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was shot and killed by a man who confronted him about the volume of the music he was playing outside a Jacksonville, Florida, gas station.
I never expected or even considered running for office. When I did decide to run, it was for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives. But then in 2018, Parkland happened. I was watching it unfold on television, and I was angry. I was so angry. I just kept expecting that something was going to come from the White House or that we would hear from our legislators. I would watch CNN and MSNBC and all the news coverage, and I just kept waiting. It was crickets for a long time. I was incredulous. I had thought, “This time, someone is going to do something.”
Those children were the same age as my son Jordan. Watching them come out of the school with their hands up, after all those children had been murdered—it broke my heart. I just kept saying, “Why is no one paying attention? Why is everyone just allowing this to happen? These are our babies.” When I was told that there was a possibility there might be a congressional seat I could run for, I thought, “I’m going to do this.”
I’d never run before. In 2016, I traveled with Hillary Clinton during her campaign as the mother of someone who had lost a child to gun violence. But that was the closest I’d ever come to a race. I just felt like someone had to stand up. Even if I didn’t win, I hoped at least the run would help to elevate this issue as something that people would go to the polls on. I did win. And I’ve been talking about gun violence ever since.
I have to be honest: These people on the other side? These politicians cannot defend their positions. There is no defense for the loss of human life. When I’m speaking in committee, many of my colleagues cannot look me in the eye. They will not look at me because they know I’m speaking the truth. They know how horrific this culture has become. They just lack the moral will and courage to do the right thing. Shame on them.
I don’t care if you’re Republican, Democrat, or independent. We all have constituents for whom this issue is critical. We all represent people who have been affected by gun violence. The difference between us is whether we choose to do the right thing. It’s that simple.
Qween Jean
Qween Jean is a New York–based activist and costume designer. In 2020, Jean founded Black Trans Liberation, an organization aiming to provide access and resources to end homelessness within the trans and gender-nonconforming communities. In 2021, she was an artist in residence at MoMA PS1 in New York, where she cocurated “Memoriam and Deliverance,” an installation that called awareness to the previous five years of transphobic fatal violence while celebrating Black trans leaders.
Even as a child, I had to live with gun violence. As a Black child, I couldn’t escape it. But I think in the last few years, we have seen it escalate. It’s police brutality, mass shootings, school shootings, intercommunity gun violence, transphobic gun violence. It’s all connected.
I’m committed to the work of liberation, but it can be difficult to stay on course because of ongoing and recurring experiences of violence. There are shootings daily, many of which do not make the news. And when the media does take notice, the emphasis is put on individuals—as if they alone are responsible and their actions have nothing to do with the wider reality. For me, I make the active choice to root what I do in community-building, in providing resources to marginalized people, in creating a daily practice that’s about freedom. It’s hard. People feel enraged. People feel heartbroken. Our ancestors have been protesting against violence—in one form or another—for centuries, and we’re still here, calling for change.
In this country, the pursuit of survival is not rewarded in the same way that the pursuit of hatred is. Survival isn’t funded and glorified. But hatred is amplified; it’s elevated. Young people, whether or not they’re trans or gender nonconforming, are resisting and rejecting the idea that violence and hatred are inevitable.
How do I survive? I’m still surviving. Our elders are still surviving. The work continues. Americans feel like it is their right to own a gun. But it is also our right to want to get home at night, to ensure that our children are safe at school. We want for our elders to be able to go to the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York, and come back home to make a strawberry shortcake. We want for the kids in Uvalde, Texas, to be able to go to class. Were their lives not important? Not American?
Christine Goggins
Christine Goggins works at the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she helps patients and their families as a violence recovery specialist. Since her best friend, Blair Holt, was shot and killed in 2007, she has been an advocate for Chicago residents impacted by gun violence.
I was a junior in high school. It was the day after my 17th birthday. I had just gotten home from school when I got a call from a friend. He said, “Are you sitting down?” He said, “Blair got shot.” And I’m like, “What?” Blair and I had been friends since grammar school. I said, “That’s not funny. Don’t say that.” And he was like, “No, I’m serious.”
I found out that Blair was at Christ Medical Center, and I just remember begging my parents to take me there. When I got to the hospital, it was on TV. This was 2007, and Blair had been shot on a public bus. That was just not as common at the time. So the news kept coming back to him. We sat for hours in the waiting room, watching and waiting. It was excruciating. And then we found out he had passed. It was one of the worst days of my life. Blair was 16. He was my best friend. After, I was shattered. At that time, I had wanted to be an ER doctor. But that situation changed me. I had a lot of misplaced anger. I was a kid, and I blamed the doctors for not saving him. I was so traumatized; I didn’t know what to do. I ended up searching for gun-violence advocacy groups, and I stumbled upon the Illinois Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. I reached out to the organization, and I started doing advocacy.
In 2019, after more than a decade of being in school and working in advocacy, a former high school classmate reached out to tell me that the University of Chicago Medicine’s Violence Recovery Program was hiring. I decided to interview, and I was offered a job as a violence recovery specialist. It was such a perfect fit.
Hospital-based violence-intervention programs are in their infancy. The purpose of our program is to be there in the immediate aftermath when somebody is injured. It’s called the “golden hour,” when people who’ve been involved in a violent event are most receptive. When patients come in, we get pages just like the medical doctors and trauma nurses. We respond to the trauma bay in the emergency department. As soon as patients are stable enough, we talk to them.
I did that work directly for three and a half years, and now I lead the team. It is heavy. When I’m training people, I tell them, “Some cases will stay with you.” I have had cases that are etched in my brain that I will never forget. But as hard as this job is, we see more survivors than we do fatalities. The marvel of the human body to me is amazing. Resilience is such a buzzword now, but the resilience that I’ve seen over these four years has been incredible.
I never would’ve picked this journey for myself. But when people ask me about my story, I get to tell Blair’s story. That was the one thing that I wanted to do—to keep his name on my lips and tell his story.
Tamika Palmer
Tamika Palmer is an activist and the mother of Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2020. She established the Breonna Taylor Foundation in her daughter’s honor.
When I talk about Breonna, there are two things I want people to know: The first is that Breonna didn’t deserve this. And the second is that 26 years was not enough for us. Breonna was an amazing person. I don’t know a person who encountered her who did not love her. When this happened, she started off as my child and my baby, and she became America’s baby. And the more people learned about her, the more people wanted to know her.
I loved her smile. She could walk in a room and just light it up. You could be having the worst day ever, and she would be like, “Uh-uh, we ain’t doing that.” She just had this spirit about her—this charisma. I don’t want to think of people as perfect, because we all have our flaws, but she was the next best thing to it. She was so much like me, but she was a much better version of me. She was a much kinder version of me. I think of her as a kid, singing. She would sing at the top of her lungs. She loved music—new music, old music. She would sing the blues.
Sometimes, the best part of my day now is just when I get to sit in a room by myself, not having to do an interview, not having to explain this to another person or correct another person about what they think happened. Some days, it’s just simply about sitting in my peace.
I’m a private person. I’m not a forefront kind of person. I don’t like to be in the spotlight. One of the hardest things for me is to be in front of cameras. I hate it. But Breonna was my baby, so I can’t not do it.
I’ve gotten through it with the help of some amazing people around me—friends, family, lawyers. The list goes on. There were so many days that I didn’t think I could stand, and I had these amazing people around me, uplifting me to fight another day.
I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot about being an activist. We all have these ideas of what it is, but there are so many different ways to do it—whether it’s art, writing a letter, making donations, pounding the street. Every single one of those things is a piece. You figure out your piece, and you make sure other people know they can do it.
Don’t wait until it happens to you or to your family to get involved in this fight. So many of us don’t know our place in this. We don’t know how to get involved, so we stay away. But waiting until it happens to you is the worst feeling ever. We have to keep this from continuing to happen.
About the Artwork
Hank Willis Thomas’s O long may it wave (2021) was originally included in the exhibition “Another Justice: Divided We Stand” at Kayne Griffin in Los Angeles and ADAA: The Art Show in 2021. Thomas, a conceptual artist, has dealt with the subject of gun violence in his work, which includes pieces like those in his Falling Stars series (2018–present), a group of blue banners, hung or installed like flags, embroidered with white stars, each one to commemorate the loss of a life in the U.S. to gun violence.
Thomas has been impacted by gun violence in his own life: In 2000, his cousin and roommate, Songha Willis, was shot and killed during a robbery. Thomas also collaborated with MASS Design Group on the Gun Violence Memorial Project, an installation at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., which consisted of four glass houses, each constructed from 700 bricks to represent the average number of lives taken due to gun violence in the U.S. every week, and included objects contributed by families that have lost loved ones to gun violence. The work was conceived as a first step toward creating a permanent memorial for victims of gun violence.
The gun-violence epidemic is not inevitable. To help make a difference, check out Moms Demand Action, a national organization that has chapters in all 50 states. March for Our Lives, which operates nationwide, trains student organizers and emphasizes the role that Gen Z has in ending this crisis. Gun violence disproportionately affects trans women—and trans women of color in particular. Visit GLITS (Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society) and Black Trans Liberation to learn more about how to get involved. Inspired to run for state or local office? Run for Something has all the resources, including tactical and strategic support as well as mentorship and training.
A version of this story appeared in the June/July 2023 issue of Harper's Bazaar.
Mattie Kahn is an award-winning writer and editor. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Vox, and more. She was the culture director at Glamour, where she covered women’s issues and politics, and a staff editor at ELLE. She lives in New York with her husband.
