“My son is 3, and he can tell the difference between a gunshot and a firecracker,” Bryant Williams, a resident of the McKinley Houses for 30 years, told me outside his building last week. “They are very similar sounds. That’s crazy.”

Not long ago, Ernesto Valentino, who has lived in the Forest Houses for 50 years, heard gunshots outside his window on consecutive nights. From what he could tell, a teenager was shooting in the air with no particular ambition. By the time the police would arrive to investigate, he told me, the boy would be long gone, having climbed high into one of the adjacent buildings. When gunshots awaken Maria Gomez, in a neighboring building, she can never go back to sleep, she said, so she stays up all night watching whatever happens to be on Lifetime Television.

Typically lost in discussions of gun control is the social cost of all this attendant anxiety. Patterns are disrupted; life is constrained. Nilda Herrera, who is 19, has been working as a home health aide at the McKinley Houses for less than a year. In that time, three shootings have occurred outside the building where she works, one of them ending in death. In one instance, she witnessed people shooting at each other while she was sitting on a bench waiting to begin her shift. Ever since, she has gone inside as soon as she arrives.