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After the Gunfire Stops

Each mass shooting creates multiple victims, many determined to turn tragedy to hope.

by

Mitch Dworet never wanted to be thrust into the spotlight of the nation’s gun debate.

“I didn’t choose this. It chose me,” is how he put it when I interviewed him at a Starbucks in suburban Florida in April 2019. It was fourteen months after one of his sons was murdered and the other injured in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, on February 14, 2018.

Nicholas, seventeen, who had just accepted a college swimming scholarship, was killed. Alex, fifteen, had a bullet graze his head and was struck by shrapnel; three students in his class—including one standing right next to him—were also killed. Dworet, who sports a large tattoo on his arm of Nick swimming, considers himself a parent, not an activist.

“To sit here and say all this stuff, that’s not my job,” said Dworet, his face marked by grief. “I’m a father. I need to move through my journey, and recover, and find my resiliency. I deserve to be a father again. And a husband to my wife.”

Every time there is a mass shooting, we hear stories like Dworet’s. After the gunfire stops and the media has moved on to the next big story and the politicians finish pontificating on gun reform, the surviving individuals and communities are left to deal with their losses for years to come, likely for the rest of their lives. A ripple effect emanates from each shooting, spinning outwards and impacting more people over time.

In March 2021, eighteen people were murdered in Atlanta, Georgia, and Boulder, Colorado, in two mass shootings less than a week apart. Since then, numerous other mass shootings—often defined as those that leave four or more people shot or killed—have occurred across the country. From the beginning of the year through the middle of July, there were more than 350 mass shootings in the United States.

Quotes from witnesses and loved ones left behind reverberate across newspapers, on radio stations, and on the Internet, moving all of us once more.

But each time we learn of the carnage caused by yet another mass shooting, the impact is much deeper than a soundbite. Those wounded are left with often permanent injuries—limbs that don’t work, pain that won’t go away.

And for every person killed or wounded, an incalculable number of family members and friends have their lives forever altered by the darkness of gun violence. Children left without a parent, parents mourning the death of their kids, and spouses forever missing their partners.

For more than a year, in 2018 and 2019, I traveled across this country interviewing gun violence survivors. I spoke with people injured by gunfire, and those who had children, parents, and cherished friends murdered in mass shootings and other kinds of gun violence.

Many channel their pain and grief into activism. Mitch Dworet, a real estate agent, and his wife, Annika, an emergency room nurse, now advocate against civilian ownership of military-style rifles like the one used by the young man who shot their sons. He was able to buy an AR-15-style assault rifle at age eighteen, despite a history of mental health problems.

The students who survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School famously marched on Washington, D.C., only five weeks afterward, to demand gun-law reform. The teens led what became an international movement run by young people who shouted, “Never Again.” That shooting violently stole the lives of seventeen people, and injured another seventeen.

As with all shootings, the emotional trauma is overwhelming. Only a year after the rampage in Parkland, two teenage survivors of the shooting died by suicide a few days apart.

On December 14, 2012, a man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and strode through the halls with a semi-automatic rifle, spraying bullets. He slaughtered twenty-six people, twenty of them six- or seven-year-olds. Children died with baseball-sized holes in their tiny bodies.

JoAnn Bacon’s six-year-old daughter, dog-loving Charlotte, was one of the children murdered at Sandy Hook. When I visited six years later, in April 2019, Charlotte’s bedroom (she loved pink) was unchanged. The neighborhood was bucolic. Bacon stressed the contrast between the general grief of the community of Sandy Hook and that of the families whose children actually died.

“Not many people acknowledge how a grieving community impacts grieving families,” Bacon told me as we sat in her bright kitchen, the two family dogs playing outside. Charlotte’s yellow lab, Lily, was her constant companion; the other, a therapy labradoodle named Luther, the Bacons brought home to help them in their darkest hours.

“That’s not something that’s talked about,” Bacon said. “And there is an impact because there’s an entire community that’s grieving this loss of twenty-six individuals. They’re grieving for their own kids’ loss of innocence. But that’s very different than grieving the loss of your six-year-old child. This is a personal loss first and a collective loss second. We’re a small community and everybody knows everyone. So, you know, relationships changed.”

The Bacons have self-published two children’s books to help them through their grief. Good Dogs, Great Listeners: The Story of Charlotte, Lily and the Litter came out in 2015. “We really wanted to have a record of her life for everybody to have the ability to know her,” Bacon told me. “To know the love that she brought into the world.”

Later that same year, the Bacons published Dogs of Newtown, a picture book written by their son Guy about the therapy dogs that had helped him and the other fifth and sixth graders in his intermediate school after his sister was killed. Guy was ten when Charlotte was killed. The Charlotte Helen Bacon Foundation supports therapy-dog programs in schools.

Before the shootings, JoAnn Bacon and her husband, Joel Bacon, were private people.

“That was just sort of taken from us as well,” she said. “Everyone knew who we were. Everyone knew our story. We felt the constant, you know, attention. You go to the grocery store, and you feel like eyes are on you and you don’t know who these people are, but they know who you are.” It feels, she says, “like you’re under a microscope all the time.”

The psychological toll on survivors is impossible to measure.

“When I would go to bed and try to sleep, I would just be haunted by the memories of what happened,” said Ron Barber, former district director for U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords.

In January 2011, Giffords was shot in the head and six other people were killed, including nine-year-old Christina-Taylor Green, as they waited in line to talk to their Congressperson in Tucson, Arizona. Another thirteen people were wounded, including Barber, who was shot in the leg and face. Giffords received a severe head injury but survived. Her brain injury resulted in aphasia, a language impairment that makes it difficult for her to translate words from her brain into speech.

“I would keep seeing Gabby get shot,” Barber recalled. “And then the image was seeing my deputy Gabe Zimmerman killed. He died at my feet. And then [U.S. District Judge] John Roll, who I’d known in college, was killed right beside me.”

Barber, like many of those who escape a mass shooting with their lives, has to deal with survivor’s guilt: “John’s dead, I’m alive. Gabe’s dead, Gabby’s alive. The four of us lying there in a row. It took a long time to deal with. How come I survived and they didn’t?”

Barber’s wife, Nancy, gave up her full-time doula practice to care for him. For many months she had to drive their car, because of his unmanageable sense of vulnerability. He became depressed and developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, a common experience for many gun violence survivors, with loud sounds causing him to jump or cower.

“Nancy basically had to devote her life to me to help me through it,” Barber said as I sat with the couple in their Tucson home in September 2018. The trauma even trickled down to their grandchildren, who were nowhere near the shooting. Since her grandfather was shot, one of the children worries about her family members when she does not know their whereabouts. The entire extended family downloaded a tracking device on their phones to ease the girl’s anxiety.

Giffords resigned from her seat in Congress in January 2012 to focus on her health. Six months later, in June 2012, Barber ran for and won that seat in a special election. In November 2012, he won in the general election, but was defeated in 2014.

Currently, Barber is southern Arizona director for U.S. Senator Mark Kelly. Kelly is Giffords’s husband, who was elected to the Senate in 2020. (He defeated Republican Martha McSally, who had unseated Barber six years earlier.)

Giffords and Kelly, both proponents of gun reform, founded Giffords, an organization to promote gun reform, after the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence focuses on the fight for a safer United States by researching, drafting, and defending “the laws, policies, and programs proven to save lives,” according to the organization.

Before the shooting, Barber worked for more than three decades in the field of developmental disabilities. He understands, more than ever after his own experience, the importance of trauma therapy for people with PTSD. He also believes strongly in the need for gun reform, and supports this through his work with Kelly and his friendship with Giffords.

“It’s a gun that’s the prevailing factor in all these incidents,” said Barber, a critic of the National Rifle Association. “If the guy had shown up with a knife, it would have been a different story, or a baseball bat, a different story, right? But when someone shows up with a gun, people are just diving under tables, or running away to the parking lot, and trying to do whatever they could to put distance between themselves and the gunman.”  

Many of those who have lost loved ones to gun violence make it a point to connect with others who are similarly affected.

Sandy and Lonnie Phillips, whose twenty-four-year-old daughter, Jessica Ghawi, was murdered in July 2012 at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, now travel the country to support survivors of public mass shootings. The shooting spree, during a midnight screening of the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, left twelve people dead and fifty-eight wounded.

The moment she learned of her daughter’s murder, Sandy screamed so loud her husband ran into the room, thinking she was being attacked. Months later, they found their new mission: a life on the road, traveling from one public mass shooting location to the next.

“It was something that was just kind of understood between the two of us,” Lonnie Phillips told me when I met with the couple in El Paso, Texas, in August 2019, ten days after a mass shooting at a nearby Walmart left twenty-three people dead and twenty-three injured. “Jessi would have been very upset if we hadn’t done everything that we could possibly do to stop this carnage.”

 “Stop the carnage, but also to help people,” added Sandy, sipping coffee at a Denny’s restaurant.

“We deployed to Sandy Hook,” five months after Jessica died, Sandy recalled. “And when those people walked, those parents walked into the community center that we were meeting at, and I saw their faces and the shock, and the disbelief, and the zombie-like [expressions]—I knew then. I knew then that this is what we’re meant to do.”

The couple founded a nonprofit group called Survivors Empowered to help other survivors of mass shootings, and to emphasize the need for trauma therapy. They have visited sixteen mass public shooting sites in the past eight years, and during the pandemic shutdowns, they helped from afar.

For some surviving witnesses, shootings can challenge the very core of their faith, and make them afraid to leave their house.

Polly Sheppard was at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church bible study shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. Her best friend of more than thirty years was murdered in front of her that evening, along with eight other members of the mostly Black congregation. Sheppard hid under a church table. After the white gunman murdered the church-goers, he looked directly at Sheppard and told her he would let her live to “tell the story of what happened.”

A member of Emanuel AME for thirty-eight years, Sheppard changed her church affiliation after the shooting. Her faith was temporarily shaken. It became too much for her to be in the building where she witnessed the violent deaths. “The atmosphere is different,” she said as we sat in her living room in 2019. “I get a kind of eerie feeling when I’m in there.”

Still, Sheppard fights her fear, and now travels to help other survivors. She journeyed to the Tree of Life Synagogue after the 2018 Pittsburgh shooting. And like Jessica Ghawi’s parents, she advises new survivors to strengthen their healing through therapy.

“I want to not have to talk,” the retired, soft-spoken nurse told me. “But people want to hear. And it’s healing some people. Some people are hurting, and they want to hear how I came up. Just to see me not all confused and crazy. It gives them hope.”

For Sheppard and other gun-violence survivors, recovery comes slowly.  And it is rocked again with each new mass shooting.

“To me, it’s a new normal,” Sheppard said. “Life is not what it used to be. It’s changed.”