DAVID*, 25, had been a college football star and played on the practice squad of a professional team when he was shot.

He was walking home from a friend’s house when he noticed a crowd in a high school car park, watching a fight between two women. As he walked away, someone pulled out a 9mm and started firing at random. The first bullet went straight through David’s leg. The second buried itself deep in the tissue beneath this shoulder blade.

These days, David’s stunted leg doesn’t bear his weight, and yawning and laughing causes him searing pain.

“It’s like dragging a dead person around with you,” he says.

Like many gunshot victims, David’s life was irreparably damaged simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is one of the young African Americans sociologist Jooyoung Lee has interviewed for a book on survivors of shootings.

The experience of taking a bullet is unique, Lee tells news.com.au. “There are some people I’ve met who didn’t even know they got shot in the moment. Their adrenaline was running so high that they ran away from a crime scene, drove their car to safety, and only later discovered that they were bleeding from wounds.

“Others feel intense shock and disorientation. They have out-of-body experiences and see themselves floating down tunnels toward a bright white light. As you can imagine, these are very traumatic to young people, who suddenly feel the fragility of their own lives.”

Victims are are almost always surprised that they are critically wounded, with the pain only really setting in once they wake up with injuries and disabilities. It ages them “quickly and abruptly”, adds Lee. “It completely changes everything. Many of the victims that I followed around in Philadelphia lived with catastrophic injuries. They had retained bullets, nerve damage, chronic pain and other lingering injuries that transformed their bodies and their sense of self.”

Lee became interested in the long-term impact of being shot when he was studying hip hop culture and following an MC called Flawliss in his attempts to “blow up”, or make it in the Los Angeles music industry in 2006.

The rapper was calling a friend from a pay phone when two members of a notoriously racist Latino street gang came up behind him and shot him twice in the back with a .44-calibre revolver, as part of an initiation rite. Before shooting him, they said: “We’re n****r killers.”

Flawliss suffered serious injuries to his internal organs and, still in his twenties, had to start wearing a colostomy bag, which he still uses to this day. His life no longer revolved around his music, but around medical visits and pain management. “His experience of living wounded was really a turning point for me,” says Lee.

The researcher began a postdoctoral fellowship in Philadelphia, then the city with the highest rates on violent crime in the US, interviewing shooting victims at the University of Pennsylvania hospital. Most didn’t have comprehensive health insurance that would give them access to rehabilitative care after their lives were saved. With crippling pain causing them intense agony, many turned to street drug dealers to get prescription pain medication.

Kevin* was a bystander hit in the leg by a stray bullet from a 2007 drive-by shooting, who Lee met while conducting his research at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars.

Four years after the shooting, Kevin still endured chronic pain and lived in fear of losing his job because his injury made him far slower on his 10-hour housekeeping shifts than his co-workers. He wanted to explain why, but worried his boss would assume he had been involved in something illegal.

The psychological impact of a shooting can be even worse than the physical.

“Life after the shooting is often very scary for people because some don’t know who shot them, or if they run the risk of being shot again,” says Lee.

“This is amplified by the fact that many live in neighbourhoods where they routinely encounter risky situations. In some places, just going to the corner store at night is a potentially dangerous situation, so you can imagine how living wounded and disabled only adds to a person’s sense of fear.

“People who have been shot, in other words, never really feel that they are ‘in the clear’.”

Gun violence in the US is overwhelmingly concentrated in poor, urban black communities, with African Americans in their twenties 17 times more likely to be shot than their white counterparts, according to the National Violent Death Reporting System.

For many survivors, there is a major disconnect between how they are perceived — as cool, tough or scary — and how weak and vulnerable they feel.

Kyle* lost a testicle in a shooting.

“His friends treated him like a local hero because he had survived the shooting, seemingly unscathed,” said Lee. “But beneath the surface he was dealing with shame and private emasculation.”

Winston* had to have parts of his intestines, kidney and pancreas removed after he was shot in the abdomen by a would-be robber, leaving him with an abdominal hernia and a colostomy bag. After three months in hospital, he came home to a big family celebration, but halfway through dinner, his hernia began to make noises and bulge out from under his shirt. “People lost their appetite,” Winston told Lee.

“I felt bad, like I was a freak. I wish I would have just died that night.”

He admitted to feeling shame and revulsion when his colostomy bag came open on a subway train, or when his girlfriend made sexual advances and he was reminded of his disfigured body.

The gunshot survivors Lee met often felt their whole existence had been disfigured. As well as the mental scars that lingered for long after the shooting, many had chronic injuries that made even routine activities, such as tooth-brushing and sleeping, agony.

What is most troubling for Lee is the “double standard” around shootings.

While we fear mass shootings by crazed gunmen could happen to us at any moment, we often assume survivors of everyday gun violence must have been drug dealing or in a gang.

“It helps us hold on to a precious myth,” says Lee. “Fatal violence only happens to people who bring it on themselves. If we can believe this, or at least think it might be true, we can feel safe again.”

*Names have been changed to protect identities.