ABANDONED: Stories from Survivors of Gun Violence

Holly Werner-Thomas

The stories of survivors of gun violence are not easy to listen to, but they’re important to hear.

This installation was a part of HEAR & NOW: An Interactive Oral History Exhibit, showcasing multimedia projects and stories recorded by the 2017 cohort of Columbia University’s Oral History MA program. 

With 110,000 Americans shot every year, gun violence is a public health crisis. Indeed, forty percent of Americans will either be shot or know someone who has been shot in their lifetimes. “THE 40% PROJECT: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America” centers the life stories of survivors and includes people from New York City to suburban Florida to rural Louisiana to sprawling Phoenix to small town Washington State. They are women and men, sons, fathers, wives, girlfriends, young single men, divorced, middle-aged women, widows, nieces, mothers and friends. The project addresses the question, how do we make meaning in the aftermath of violence? But it also has social transformation at its heart. My sincere hope is that the personal testimony of survivors can become part of the process of change.

In my exhibit, I wanted to show both the damage gun violence is doing (the original trauma of being shot or losing someone to gun violence), and how survivors feel abandoned in the wake of that gun violence, what human rights activist Jill Stauffer calls, “ethical loneliness.”

Here are three very different stories from three survivors whose only connection is the easy access to guns that shattered all of their lives.

Holly Werner-Thomas is a writer and oral historian whose practice is grounded in historical scholarship and current events, but who has a passion for true stories no matter the topic. She is a graduate of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia University, where she initiated an ongoing effort to capture the stories of gun violence victims (“The 40 Percent Project: An Oral History of Gun Violence in America”). Her documentary play based on the interviews, The Survivors, won the Columbia University 2020 Jeffrey H. Brodsky Oral History Award. Holly is on an upcoming OHA panel this fall, “Is Oral History White? Investigating Race in Three Baltimore Oral History Projects.” She is also currently visiting oral history consultant for History Associates, Inc., leading projects for the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Lemelson-MIT Program.