July, 11 2019, 12:00am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
AIUSA media office,Email:,media@aiusa.org,Phone: 202-544-0200 x302
USA: Survivors of Gun Violence Face Lifetime of Pain and Expense
WASHINGTON
Survivors of gun violence in the USA suffer years of trauma and pain due to a destructive combination of government policies which ignore their needs, Amnesty International said today as it released new research into the experiences of gunshot survivors.
Describing gun violence in the USA as a "human rights crisis", Scars of Survival: Gun Violence and Barriers to Reparation in the USA highlighted how survivors are often unable to access healthcare and other forms of support due to catastrophic medical expenses and excessive bureaucracy. It called on the US government to put in place necessary mechanisms to ensure survivors of firearm violence have access to full and effective reparation.
"Most of the people we interviewed told us that being shot was just the start of their nightmare. Survivors described how they continue to struggle despite being victims of crime and are often faced with prohibitive costs to treat their chronic pain or get help adapting to disabilities," said Sanhita Ambast, Amnesty International's researcher on economic, social and cultural rights.
"High costs, cumbersome paperwork and inadequate crime victim compensation programs are all barriers to accessing proper care and support following the trauma of a shooting. The US authorities need to get a grip on gun violence, and ensure survivors have the support necessary to address the harms they have suffered and to rebuild their lives. Given their failure to adequately address gun violence on a large scale, there's even more of an impetus to provide assistance to survivors."
In 2018, Amnesty International interviewed 25 gunshot survivors in Miami, Tampa, Baltimore and New Orleans, all cities with high rates of gun violence. The organization also spoke to 11 care-givers, 17 health workers and 40 public health experts, advocates, activists and social workers.
Costs and reparation
Amnesty International's research shows the US government is failing to provide gunshot survivors with essential long-term healthcare, support, rehabilitation, and compensation that are essential to ensure that the government fulfils its obligations to provide them with full and effective reparation. Amnesty International has previously argued that the US government has failed to meet its human rights obligations by failing to adequately regulate the purchase, possession and use of firearms by private actors.
Because there are no targeted programs to provide for the rehabilitation needs of gunshot survivors, they have to seek medical and psychological care through the general health system. This poses numerous economic and bureaucratic obstacles, exacerbated by trauma and physical pain.
Megan Hobson was 16 years old when she was caught in crossfire in Miami in 2012. Emergency treatment saved her life, but she continues to live with health conditions including difficulties walking, complications caused by bullet fragments in her uterus, and the need for mental health care and support. Megan told Amnesty International she was still in debt due to medical bills.
"I was a victim, I had nothing to do with my crime. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," she said.
I was a victim, I had nothing to do with my crime. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.Megan Hobson
Jamie Williford was shot in the back when she was 16, in 2009. She was left paralyzed and with severe, ongoing health needs. Although Jamie is covered by Medicaid, a governmental program providing health coverage for some people with low incomes, she faces significant bureaucratic challenges accessing healthcare, particularly finding health professionals who will accept her insurance.
Like many gunshot survivors with disabilities, Jamie has struggled to find affordable, accessible housing.
After her injury, she was placed in an adult institutional care facility, with no access to mental health care, education or training appropriate to a child or a new wheelchair user. Since she turned 18, she has lived largely in shared accommodation, but has been unable to secure any suitable permanent housing adapted to her needs.
Amnesty International highlighted Jamie's case as an example of how gun violence survivors are caught in the crosshairs of numerous failing policies - difficulties accessing healthcare, a lack of affordable housing, and insufficient support for people with disabilities.
Stifling bureaucracy
Almost all gunshot survivors interviewed by Amnesty identified bureaucracy and paperwork as a key barrier to accessing long-term healthcare.
This is particularly challenging for gunshot survivors who may be living in unstable environments and be unused to navigating a fragmented and complicated healthcare system. They are often simultaneously trying to negotiate and process changes in their health, family lives, jobs or job prospects, because of being shot.
One man whose brother was shot explained, "For healthcare, if you want to get more care or any [Medicare] cover, they start to ask have you ever worked. If you say yes, they want to see cheque stubs for six months, and they want your birth certificate, they want a social security card, they want all that stuff and we ain't got it."
Victim compensation applications also require significant amounts of detail and supporting documentation, which can be difficult to provide especially when people are recovering from serious or life-changing injuries.
In 2017, the most common reason for denying or closing a victim compensation application across all states was incomplete information. Lack of awareness and stringent eligibility requirements also emerged as obstacles to accessing compensation.
Recommendations
"Amnesty International is calling on US federal and state authorities to ensure that survivors of gun violence have access to the healthcare and support they need, and that they are fully informed about the healthcare and other benefits they are eligible for," said Sanhita Ambast.
The organization is also calling for authorities to ensure all survivors of gun violence are provided with full and effective reparation, including compensation for the harms they have suffered.
"Providing adequate long-term care to gun violence survivors in the USA is not an unsolvable problem," said Jasmeet Sidhu, Amnesty International USA's research manager on the End Gun Violence campaign. "There are steps that local, state and federal authorities can take today if only they have the political will to take them."
Amnesty International is a global movement of millions of people demanding human rights for all people - no matter who they are or where they are. We are the world's largest grassroots human rights organization.
(212) 807-8400LATEST NEWS
Holocaust Survivor Tells Student Anti-Genocide Protesters: 'Just Keep Doing It'
"There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism," said Stephen Kapos. "If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt."
Apr 25, 2024
A Holocaust survivor opposed to Israel's war on Gaza on Wednesday told U.S. student protesters they're on the right side of history, and that the global wave of demonstrations against the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians will soon force Western leaders to face up to their complicity in genocide.
Stephen Kapos, 86, was 7 years old in 1944 when he was separated from his family during the Nazi extermination of Jews in his native Hungary. Most of his family was murdered in the Holocaust but Kapos survived and moved to the United Kingdom after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary.
Kapos is part of a small group of Shoah survivors and their descendants who "demonstrate disagreement with the use of the Holocaust experience as a cover by the Zionists and the state of Israel." They attend protests wearing signs around their necks reading, "This Holocaust Survivor Says Stop the Genocide in Gaza!"
"As a Holocaust survivor, my message to the brave student protesters in America is just keep doing it. Don't give up," Kapos said in video published by Double Down News. "We are doing exactly the same, and in the long term we are going to prevail."
Holocaust Survivor Message to US Campus Protesters:
This survivor of the Holocaust is against Genocide in Gaza & conflating Jewishness with Zionism, which does nothing but increase antisemitism.
Your protests are so persistent, large and global that eventually the Western… pic.twitter.com/IDCH0NTO6m
— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) April 24, 2024
Kapos' comments came amid a growing wave of pro-Palestine student protests—many of them Jewish-led—on dozens of U.S. university and college campuses in response to Israel's U.S.-backed war on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice in January found "plausibly" genocidal and which many Israeli and international experts say is undoubtedly a genocide.
According to Gazan and international officials, more than 122,000 Palestinians have been killed or maimed during 202 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks. This figure includes around 11,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings. Around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been forcibly displaced. Starvation and dehydration caused by Israel's bombardment and blockade of Gaza are killing children and other vulnerable people.
Instead of condemning Israeli leaders, the Biden administration has lavished them with billions of dollars in U.S. military aid while providing diplomatic cover for Israeli crimes and blocking recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations.
As the suffering in Gaza continues, U.S. students have set up encampments or staged other forms of protest, some of which have been brutally repressed by police—who have also attacked and arrested journalists and bystanders.
On Wednesday, far-right Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu implored U.S. authorities to crack down even harder on the students, whom he called an "antisemitic mob."
Highlighting video footage of Netanyahu comparing the student protests to what happened at German universities during the rise of Nazism, Kapos said that "the way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they're doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust."
He said he is also protesting "the conflating of Jewishness with Zionism, which is what the Israeli state is trying to do, which does nothing but increase antisemitism."
Kapos predicted that "today's marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership—which are trying to deny what is actually going on—will be forced to face up to it, and I think we are not far from that."
"Today's marches are having a very hopeful aspect that is so large, so persistent, so global that eventually the Western leadership—which are trying to deny what is actually going on—will be forced to face up to it."
"There is a question of historical responsibility towards injustice, genocide, and fascism," Kapos asserted. "If you are indifferent, if you do not take a stand, you acquire a degree of guilt without any doubt and I think it is imperative to assert opposition and even some degree of disadvantage and risk if you want to be guilt-free when history judges what's happening."
Kapos and his comrades are part of a long history of Holocaust survivors speaking out against Israeli crimes against Palestinians.
Long before today's growing acknowledgment that Israel is an apartheid state, the late Suzanne Weiss—whose parents were murdered in Nazi-occupied France—said in 2010 that "the Palestinians are victims of ethnic cleansing and apartheid" and that "the Israeli government's actions toward the Palestinians awaken horrific memories of my family's experiences under Hitlerism."
Hajo Meyer, who survived 10 months in the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, argued during his lifetime that "what is happening to the Palestinians every day under the occupation" was "almost identical" to "what was done to the German Jews before the 'Final Solution,'" and that instead of making Jews safer, Israeli policies and practices were stoking the flames of antisemitism.
Holocaust survivors who stand up for Palestinian rights have been condemned by critics as "antisemites" and "self-hating Jews" who, in Meyer's case, allegedly abused his status as a Holocaust survivor.
Kapos, who has experienced such slurs, is undaunted and says he has no plans to stop protesting. During a recent rally in London he vowed, "I'll keep doing it as long as the bombing and apartheid and the injustice is going on."
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'A Moral Crisis': Wars Fuel Spike in Global Hunger as Arms Giants Rake in ​Record​ Profits
"It is unforgivable that over 281 million people are suffering acute hunger while the world's richest continue to make extraordinary profits."
Apr 25, 2024
A report published Wednesday found that the number of people around the world suffering acute hunger surged to 282 million last year amid the intensifying climate crisis and military conflicts—including Israel's assault on Gaza—that have further enriched weapons manufacturers.
The Global Report on Food Crises estimates that 281.6 million people in 59 countries faced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2023, an increase of 24 million compared to the previous year.
2023 marked the fifth consecutive year that global hunger has worsened, according to the new report, which found that Gazans account for 80% of the people facing imminent famine globally. Dozens of people in the Gaza Strip, mostly children, have starved to death in recent weeks as Israel continues to bomb the territory and impede the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian aid.
The report, a collaborative project of more than a dozen organizations including the World Food Program (WFP), said military conflict was the "primary driver affecting 20 countries with nearly 135 million people in acute food insecurity—almost half of the global number."
"The Sudan faced the largest deterioration due to conflict, with 8.6 million more people facing high levels of acute food insecurity as compared with 2022," the report found.
Extreme weather events fueled by the continued burning of oil, gas, and coal "were the primary driversin 18 countries where over 77 million people faced high levels of acute food insecurity, up from 12 countries with 57 million people in 2022," the document added.
"When we talk about acute food insecurity, we are talking about hunger so severe that it poses an immediate threat to people's livelihoods and lives," said Dominique Burgeon, director of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Liaison Office in Geneva. "This is hunger that threatens to slide into famine and cause widespread death."
Emily Farr, global food and economic security lead at Oxfam International, said in response to the new figures that "the global hunger crisis is fundamentally a moral crisis."
"It is unforgivable that over 281 million people are suffering acute hunger while the world's richest continue to make extraordinary profits, including the same aerospace and defense corporations helping to fuel conflict, the main driver of hunger," said Farr. "The top 100 arms companies have hoarded nearly $600 billion in revenues just in 2022—enough to cover the U.N. global humanitarian appeal almost 13 times."
"States must prioritize justice and peace over politics, and radically reform global peace and security bodies to protect international law rather than perpetuate impunity."
Israel's war on Gaza and Russia's assault on Ukraine have been a major boon for the global weapons industry, propelling arms makers to record profits as governments ramp up orders for tanks, howitzers, missiles, and other lethal military equipment.
"This is a form of corporate welfare not only for the largest weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, and General Dynamics, which have seen their stock prices skyrocket, but also for companies that are not typically seen as part of the weapons industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Toyota," the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) noted in a recent analysis.
Late last year, AFSC created an online database that allows users to see which companies are profiting from Israel's military assault on the Gaza Strip.
WFP's global hunger report was released on the same day U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a measure containing tens of billions of dollars in additional military assistance for Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
Reutersreported Thursday that Lockheed Martin and RTX—major arms manufacturers—"stand to profit" from the aid package's "$95 billion of mostly new weapons funding."
"The United States needs to buy and restock 'Tomahawk, AMRAAM, Coyote, SM-6,' RTX's CFO Neil Mitchill told Reuters in an interview, listing a long-range cruise missile, an air-to-air missile, a small drone, and a ground-based missile that can be used for air defense," the outlet noted. "In most cases, the U.S. has either sent the munitions to Ukraine or used them to defend Red Sea shipping lanes."
Farr said Wednesday that "we cannot drastically change course without a global awakening."
"States must prioritize justice and peace over politics, and radically reform global peace and security bodies to protect international law rather than perpetuate impunity," said Farr. "Governments must also rehaul our global food system, tax the rich to invest in the public majority—the small farmers, workers, and vulnerable communities—and support green economies."
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"Today marks the last day that internet service providers can continue to put profit over people," said one advocate.
Apr 25, 2024
Open internet advocates on Thursday applauded the Federal Communications Commission's long-anticipated vote to revive net neutrality rules and reestablish FCC oversight of broadband.
The 3-2 vote along party lines to reclassify broadband as a public service under Title II of the Communications Act came seven months after FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel announced the push in the wake of the U.S. Senate confirming Commissioner Anna Gomez.
Commissioner Geoffrey Starks joined Rosenworcel and Gomez to launch the rulemaking process last year and finalize the policy change on Thursday. Commissioner Brendan Carr and Nathan Simington both aligned with the powerful telecom industry by opposing the effort to prevent internet service providers from blocking, throttling, or engaging in paid prioritization of lawful online content.
Demand Progress Education Fund senior campaigner Joey DeFrancesco said the revival "has been desperately needed" since former FCC Chair Ajit Pai—an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump—led the "disastrous decision" in 2017 to gut a 2015 agency policy codifying the principle that has been foundational to the internet since its inception.
"Internet access is not a luxury, but a necessity to participate in society and survive in our modern economy," DeFrancesco stressed. "The FCC's new rule will ensure the commission has the full ability to expand broadband and the authority to ensure access to an open internet."
"The FCC's vote today returns the internet to the American people."
Free Press co-CEO Craig Aaron declared that "everyone should celebrate today's FCC vote."
"Public support for net neutrality is overwhelming, and people understand why we need a federal watchdog to protect everyone's access to the most essential communications platform of our time," he noted. "The FCC heard the outcry and did its job: delivering on promises to stand with internet users and against big telecom companies and their trade groups, which have spent untold millions of dollars to spread lies about net neutrality and thwart any oversight or regulation."
Aaron praised Rosenworcel and her staff for leading the restoration effort, as well as Starks and Gomez for working with her to reverse the Trump FCC's move and ensure "that the agency can once again protect internet users whenever big phone and cable companies like AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum, and Verizon attempt to harm them."
"Big cable and phone companies won't be able to pick and choose what any of us can say or see online. Net neutrality is a guarantee that these companies will carry our data across the internet without undue interference or unreasonable discrimination," he emphasized. "This is what democracy should look like: Public servants responding to public sentiment, taking steps to protect just and reasonable services and free expression, and showing that the government is capable of defending the public interest."
Michael Copps, a former FCC commissioner and current Common Cause special adviser, was similarly enthusiastic, saying that "if I weren't out of the country today, I would be personally at the FCC jumping up and down, saluting the majority for reinstituting the network neutrality rules that were so foolishly eliminated by the previous commission."
"Our communications technologies are evolving so swiftly, affecting so many important aspects of our individual lives, that they must be available to all of us on a nondiscriminatory basis. And they must advance the public interest, protecting consumers, fostering competition, and providing us all the news and information we need as we fight to maintain our democracy," he continued. "We still have much to do; but today, let's celebrate a huge step forward."
The vote notably comes during an election year—and as Democratic President Joe Biden, a net neutrality supporter, is gearing up for a November rematch against Trump.
"The internet is crucial to civic engagement in the United States today. It functions as a virtual public square where social justice movements organize and garner support," said Common Cause's Ishan Mehta. "The FCC's vote today returns the internet to the American people."
Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, also piled on the praise, proclaiming that "today marks the last day that internet service providers can continue to put profit over people."
"We are thrilled that the FCC now has the authority it needs to protect consumers, promote the exercise of First Amendment rights online, and ensure that everyone has access to high-quality, affordable internet," she said. "However, we urge the commission not to exercise its authority to preempt consistent state laws that grant consumers additional protections."
John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, also celebrated the vote while stressing that the commission's work is far from over. In addition to warning of court fights to come, he said that "broadband providers will continue attempting to rebrand their old plans for internet fast and slow lanes, hoping to sneak them through."
"The FCC will need to diligently enforce its rules," Bergmayer argued, "including clarifying that discrimination in favor of certain apps or categories of traffic 'impairs' and 'degrades' traffic that is left in the slow lane, and that broadband providers cannot simply take apps that people use on the internet every day and package them as a separate 'nonbroadband' service."
"The FCC must also ensure that practices that are not expressly prohibited but still unreasonably interfere with the ability of end users to freely use the internet, or of edge providers to freely compete, are disallowed," he added. "These practices include discriminatory zero-rating and network interconnection practices."
Like Leventoff, he also recognized the vital role of states with stricter policies, saying that those "with excellent net neutrality and broadband consumer protection statutes, like California, can be a nationwide model for other states and the FCC to adopt to strengthen their own rules."
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