“I don’t know who I am any more,” Ashley Moser said, trying to account for the manifest harm done to her by a gunman who sprayed a movie theater audience with bullets five years ago in Aurora, Colo.

As the audience screamed and ducked for cover, Ms. Moser had turned to shield her 6-year-old daughter, Veronica. But the girl was fatally wounded in the thunderous volley. Ms. Moser, 25, was shot in the spine, and collapsed. Soon after, the fetus she carried was lost in the hospital struggle to keep the mother alive. Ms. Moser survived, paralyzed from the waist down.

“I was a mom when I was 18, and that’s all I knew how to be,” Ms. Moser testified two years ago, bewildered and weeping, at the trial of James Holmes, who killed 12 and wounded and injured 70 in his shooting spree with a military style rifle equipped with a 100-round ammunition drum. “And now I’m not a mom,” Ms. Moser said with desperate finality from her wheelchair.

As the fifth anniversary of the Aurora carnage approaches, Ms. Moser and her family fight daily for survival, like so many in the sizable but little noticed cohort of those wounded in the nation’s gun assaults. For them, closure — the cliché of so many gun death stories — is not easily attainable.