With no dependable, uniform data on gun violence, it’s impossible to get even a simple tally of the number of shootings in the United States. So Baltimore Sun reporter Justin George and Marquette University students, as part of the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism, spent months trying to understand how many people are shot and how often they survive.
What they found is that the odds of survival for gunshot victims were getting worse in at least 10 of the nation’s largest cities, including Baltimore, New York and Chicago. George also culled data from the Baltimore morgue and from hospitals nationwide and found that victims are so riddled with bullets, often to the head, that doctors and decades of trauma care advancements couldn’t save them.
“Even as patients with major injuries from other assaults and car accidents have seen their chances improve dramatically,” the story noted, “gunshot victims have watched their chances of survival plummet.”