In 2019, Mia Tretta, then a highschool freshman at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California, was struck within the abdomen by a spherical from a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun fired by a schoolmate. Two college students had been killed in the course of the assault, together with her finest pal, and two others had been injured.
When she graduated from highschool, she enrolled at Brown University, the scene of one other capturing in December 2025, whereas she was finding out for finals in her dorm room.
As messages flooded in about an energetic shooter on campus, she felt ache the place she had been shot within the abdomen. The school junior skilled a phenomenon she known as “phantom bullet syndrome,” much like phantom limb syndrome, by which somebody senses one thing is there that isn’t. It happens every time she feels extraordinarily careworn, she stated.
“It’s crazy to say that the first time, I was the lucky one because though I got shot, I didn’t get killed,” stated Tretta, now an anti-gun violence advocate who’s finding out public affairs and training. “And the second time, I was the lucky one because I was a few blocks away.”
Tretta represents a small but growing cohort of younger individuals who have lived by a couple of capturing. She additionally embodies the findings of a current examine that hyperlinks gun violence publicity to power ache.
The examine, published in BMC Public Health in January, discovered that each direct and oblique publicity to gun violence are linked to larger charges of chronic pain amongst American adults.
Rutgers University researchers studied six kinds of gun violence publicity: being shot, being threatened with a gun, listening to gunshots, witnessing a capturing, realizing a pal or member of the family who was shot, and realizing somebody who died by firearm suicide. Using a nationally consultant survey of 8,009 folks, they discovered that 23.9% had ache most days or each day, whereas 18.8% stated they’d lots of ache.
Daniel Semenza, the examine’s lead creator, informed The Trace that whether or not somebody has misplaced an individual to gun violence or they’ve been shot themselves, their psychological and bodily well being are inextricably linked.
“Your body, through the experience of post-traumatic stress, is going to feel as if it’s happening over and over and over again,” stated Semenza, the director of analysis on the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and an affiliate professor at Rutgers University.
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Tretta underwent surgeries to take away the bullet, she stated, and later acquired a nerve block to deal with ongoing ache from her accidents. But the bullet fragments stay in her physique years later, she stated.
She was additionally recognized with psoriatic arthritis — a power illness inflicting swelling, ache, and stiffness within the joints.
“I have dealt with chronic pain, immunodeficiencies, and bodily differences ever since the shooting happened,” Tretta stated. “Every time I get a fever, it’s a completely different thing than anyone else I know, or even pre-shooting for me. I shake uncontrollably, and it hurts to even touch my arm.”
The Rutgers study is among the first to deal with outcomes like power ache as a part of an rising physique of labor on the bodily well being toll of gun violence publicity.
“It highlights the fact that, for the thousands of people who are killed every year, there are lots of people who knew those folks,” Semenza stated. “The toll of gun violence is much broader than we originally anticipated.”
Efrat Eichenbaum, an inpatient psychologist who has handled gun violence survivors and their households at a Level 1 trauma heart in north Minneapolis, stated the examine precisely displays what she has seen in her medical work.
“You can plainly see the trauma that follows an event like that,” she stated. “Not just for the survivors, but for their families. It does not even limit itself to family members. This is an issue that touches entire communities.”
David Patterson, an emeritus professor on the University of Washington whose work focuses on ache, says the examine exhibits, specifically, simply how far the influence of gun violence followers out and the way pricey an issue it’s for society.
“Chronic pain is a major health problem in itself, and it costs our society billions of dollars because it’s very hard to manage,” he stated. “You can’t cure it; it has to be managed.”
Back in her dorm room at Brown, Tretta defined that medical care doesn’t finish when somebody leaves the hospital after a trauma like hers. It goes on for years.
“Your body will never be the same as it was before,” she stated. “There’s no time that you can’t feel the 7 or 8 inches of scar tissue running through the middle of your stomach. It’s just a constant physical reminder, because you can’t leave your body.”
This article was reported by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom masking gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.
