The Western Journal of Emergency Medicine has recently published a study about the long-term physical and mental consequences of those that have survived a mass shooting.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been over 340 mass shootings in the US as of July 2023.
A mass shooting is an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, excluding the shooter.
“What gets less attention, sometimes no attention, is what happens to the survivors, those people that were not killed in these mass shootings,” said Oscar Villanueva, COO of TAL Global, a Silicon Valley-based Security Consulting and Risk Management firm.
“Invariably, their lives have been forever impacted as well.”
Villanueva points to one of the people shot at the 2017 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas.
“Following the shooting, the victim had to undergo five surgeries over 2.5 years, costing over $450,000. Worse yet, the victim has still been unable to return to work.”
The new study involved thirteen shootings and 403 survivors from 2012 to 2019.
Among the findings were the following:
“Conducting a workplace violence threat assessment can help prevent violence, protect individuals and property and improve safety,” said Villanueva.
“If an incident does occur, a threat assessment provides a strategy to mitigate and manage these violent attacks.”