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Short abstract:

Repair often falls from narratives of the aftermaths of gun violence. This work focuses on trajectories of repair after gunshot injury and paralysis by following survivors in physical therapy, bullet removal, and disability to address how the healing body can reframe the politics gun violence.

Long abstract:

In the US's gun violence epidemic, most people survive being shot despite a journalistic fixation on causalities. Across various US cities -- many of them characterized by hypersegregation, poverty, and a flood of cheap unregistered guns -- individuals often expect to be shot, even multiple times during their lives. Yet paralysis (para- and quadriplegia) rarely figure in that trajectory. This paper presents on ethnographic research for those whose shooting results in disabling spinal cord injuries. It follows predominantly young black men, as they negotiate crucial days of physical therapy to regain as much mobility as possible. It asks: how do survivors tend to lingering wounds and the realities of disability and permanent mobilization? And, how does the body remember gun violence when, for instance, so many survivors have irretrievable bullets lodged in their bodies? It contrasts survivors’ constructions of their bodies and wounds with clinicians who, often through a racialized lens, see bodies deserving of their injuries through presumed gang activity. What both counts as repair, and its quality, depends on these constructions.

Apart from grief, repair often falls from narratives of the aftermaths of gun violence. Attending to repair expands understandings of the tolls of guns in America from a perspective of episodic violence (e.g., mass shootings) and death counts to center the slow violence of ongoing wound cultures. In terms of activism, how might attention to the long repair of gun violence develop new ways to conceptualize responses that move beyond the usual, ossified politics of guns?