Thursday, February 15, 2018 4:15:32 PM
The True Cost of Gun Violence in America
The data the NRA doesn’t want you to see.
By Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee, and James West
Apr. 15, 2015 10:00 AM
It was a mild, crystal clear desert evening on November 15, 2004, when Jennifer Longdon and her fiance, David Rueckert, closed up his martial-arts studio and headed out to grab some carnitas tortas from a nearby taqueria. They were joking and chatting about wedding plans—the local Japanese garden seemed perfect—as Rueckert turned their pickup into the parking lot of a strip mall in suburban north Phoenix. A red truck with oversize tires and tinted windows sideswiped theirs, and as they stopped to get out, Rueckert’s window exploded. He told Longdon to get down and reached for the handgun he had inside a cooler on the cab floor. As he threw the truck into gear, there were two more shots. His words turned to gibberish and he slumped forward, his foot on the gas. A bullet hit Longdon’s back like a bolt of lightning, her whole body a live wire as they accelerated toward the row of palm trees in the concrete divider.
The air bag against her was stifling, the inside of the cab hot. She managed to call 911. “Where are you shot on your body?” the dispatcher asked. “I don’t know, I cannot move. I can’t breathe anymore. Somebody help me,” she pleaded. “I’m dying.”
https://youtu.be/Nook1b8EyTs
There was a rush of cool air, and a man leaning over her. Then a flood of bright lights. “Am I being medevacked?” she asked. “Those are news vultures,” the EMT told her. He shielded her face with his hand as they rushed the gurney into the ambulance. She couldn’t stop thinking of her 12-year-old. “Tell my son I love him,” she said.
Half of her ribs were shattered. Her lungs had collapsed and were filling with blood. As the ambulance screamed toward the hospital, Longdon, an avid scuba diver, clawed at the oxygen mask. She kept trying to tell them: “My regulator isn’t working. My regulator isn’t working.” The EMT held her hand as she faded in and out.
She was barely hanging on as the ER doctor prepared to insert a tube through her rib cage. “I’m really fast,” he assured her, “and I’m going to do this as quickly as I can.” As the nursing staff held her down, Longdon heard a dog wailing in the corner of the room. How could they allow a dog into this sterile place and let it howl like that? “The last thing I remember was realizing that it wasn’t a dog,” she recalls. “It was me.”
A couple of days into what would become her five-month hospital stay, Longdon was lying with her back to the door when a doctor came in. She didn’t see his face when he calmly told her the news: She was a T-4 paraplegic, no longer able to move her body from the middle of her chest down. Rueckert had also survived, but a bullet through his brain left him profoundly cognitively impaired and in need of permanent round-the-clock care.
Click here to read these survivor's stories:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/survivors-of-gun-violence/
Longdon didn’t know it yet, but she was also facing financial ruin. Shortly after the shooting, her health insurance provider found a way to drop her coverage based on a preexisting condition. She would be hospitalized three more times in quick succession, twice for infections and once for a broken bone; all told, the bills would approach $1 million in the first year alone. Longdon was forced to file for personal bankruptcy—a stinging humiliation for someone who had earned about $80,000 a year working in the software industry and building a massage therapy practice on the side.
“I’d never not paid a bill on time before that,” Longdon told me as we looked across the mostly empty parking lot on an overcast afternoon in late February. Little had changed about the place except for the name on the Mexican restaurant. “I felt like a failure,” she added, beginning the lengthy process of loading herself back into her custom lift-equipped van. “Those doctors had given their all to save my life.”
Over the past decade, Longdon has been hospitalized at least 20 times. One especially bad fall from her wheelchair in 2011 broke major bones in both legs. She came close to having them amputated and had to have titanium rods inserted. In 2013, she was admitted five times for sepsis, once after being defibrillated on her living room floor because the fever from the infection had caused her heart to stop. She has taken so many antibiotics that some no longer have any effect.
Most of Longdon’s medical bills have been covered through a combination of Medicaid and Medicare. Her income since the shooting has been primarily from Social Security Disability Insurance, which pays her about $2,000 a month. It has amounted to about a quarter million dollars over the past 10 years, though that’s barely been enough to keep her in her small house, which required extensive modifications just so she could wheel herself through the front door, take a shower, or make a bowl of ramen for dinner.
When I asked Longdon to try to add it all up—the hospital bills, the countless hours of physical therapy, the trauma counseling, the in-home care, the wheelchairs, the customized van, her lost income—she let out a sharp laugh. “Please don’t make me cry.” She pondered the numbers for a long moment. “I don’t know, maybe $5 million?” She started the engine and used a lever next to the steering wheel to accelerate back toward the main road.
How much does gun violence cost our country? It’s a question we’ve been looking into at Mother Jones ever since the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, left 58 wounded and 12 dead. How much care would the survivors and the victims’ families need? What would be the effects on the broader community, and how far out would those costs ripple? As we’ve continued to investigate gun violence, one of our more startling discoveries is that nobody really knows.
[...]
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america/
The data the NRA doesn’t want you to see.
By Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee, and James West
Apr. 15, 2015 10:00 AM
It was a mild, crystal clear desert evening on November 15, 2004, when Jennifer Longdon and her fiance, David Rueckert, closed up his martial-arts studio and headed out to grab some carnitas tortas from a nearby taqueria. They were joking and chatting about wedding plans—the local Japanese garden seemed perfect—as Rueckert turned their pickup into the parking lot of a strip mall in suburban north Phoenix. A red truck with oversize tires and tinted windows sideswiped theirs, and as they stopped to get out, Rueckert’s window exploded. He told Longdon to get down and reached for the handgun he had inside a cooler on the cab floor. As he threw the truck into gear, there were two more shots. His words turned to gibberish and he slumped forward, his foot on the gas. A bullet hit Longdon’s back like a bolt of lightning, her whole body a live wire as they accelerated toward the row of palm trees in the concrete divider.
The air bag against her was stifling, the inside of the cab hot. She managed to call 911. “Where are you shot on your body?” the dispatcher asked. “I don’t know, I cannot move. I can’t breathe anymore. Somebody help me,” she pleaded. “I’m dying.”
https://youtu.be/Nook1b8EyTs
There was a rush of cool air, and a man leaning over her. Then a flood of bright lights. “Am I being medevacked?” she asked. “Those are news vultures,” the EMT told her. He shielded her face with his hand as they rushed the gurney into the ambulance. She couldn’t stop thinking of her 12-year-old. “Tell my son I love him,” she said.
Half of her ribs were shattered. Her lungs had collapsed and were filling with blood. As the ambulance screamed toward the hospital, Longdon, an avid scuba diver, clawed at the oxygen mask. She kept trying to tell them: “My regulator isn’t working. My regulator isn’t working.” The EMT held her hand as she faded in and out.
She was barely hanging on as the ER doctor prepared to insert a tube through her rib cage. “I’m really fast,” he assured her, “and I’m going to do this as quickly as I can.” As the nursing staff held her down, Longdon heard a dog wailing in the corner of the room. How could they allow a dog into this sterile place and let it howl like that? “The last thing I remember was realizing that it wasn’t a dog,” she recalls. “It was me.”
A couple of days into what would become her five-month hospital stay, Longdon was lying with her back to the door when a doctor came in. She didn’t see his face when he calmly told her the news: She was a T-4 paraplegic, no longer able to move her body from the middle of her chest down. Rueckert had also survived, but a bullet through his brain left him profoundly cognitively impaired and in need of permanent round-the-clock care.
Click here to read these survivor's stories:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/survivors-of-gun-violence/
Longdon didn’t know it yet, but she was also facing financial ruin. Shortly after the shooting, her health insurance provider found a way to drop her coverage based on a preexisting condition. She would be hospitalized three more times in quick succession, twice for infections and once for a broken bone; all told, the bills would approach $1 million in the first year alone. Longdon was forced to file for personal bankruptcy—a stinging humiliation for someone who had earned about $80,000 a year working in the software industry and building a massage therapy practice on the side.
“I’d never not paid a bill on time before that,” Longdon told me as we looked across the mostly empty parking lot on an overcast afternoon in late February. Little had changed about the place except for the name on the Mexican restaurant. “I felt like a failure,” she added, beginning the lengthy process of loading herself back into her custom lift-equipped van. “Those doctors had given their all to save my life.”
Over the past decade, Longdon has been hospitalized at least 20 times. One especially bad fall from her wheelchair in 2011 broke major bones in both legs. She came close to having them amputated and had to have titanium rods inserted. In 2013, she was admitted five times for sepsis, once after being defibrillated on her living room floor because the fever from the infection had caused her heart to stop. She has taken so many antibiotics that some no longer have any effect.
Most of Longdon’s medical bills have been covered through a combination of Medicaid and Medicare. Her income since the shooting has been primarily from Social Security Disability Insurance, which pays her about $2,000 a month. It has amounted to about a quarter million dollars over the past 10 years, though that’s barely been enough to keep her in her small house, which required extensive modifications just so she could wheel herself through the front door, take a shower, or make a bowl of ramen for dinner.
When I asked Longdon to try to add it all up—the hospital bills, the countless hours of physical therapy, the trauma counseling, the in-home care, the wheelchairs, the customized van, her lost income—she let out a sharp laugh. “Please don’t make me cry.” She pondered the numbers for a long moment. “I don’t know, maybe $5 million?” She started the engine and used a lever next to the steering wheel to accelerate back toward the main road.
How much does gun violence cost our country? It’s a question we’ve been looking into at Mother Jones ever since the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, left 58 wounded and 12 dead. How much care would the survivors and the victims’ families need? What would be the effects on the broader community, and how far out would those costs ripple? As we’ve continued to investigate gun violence, one of our more startling discoveries is that nobody really knows.
[...]
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun-violence-in-america/
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