One thing that particularly surprised me was how relatively few people died of their wounds. My first year on the beat, more than 80 percent of all shooting victims lived. That turned out to be a fairly typical rate for Newark and the rest of the country. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 84,149 people died in shootings in the United States from 2004 to 2010. During that time, another 350,157 people were injured in shootings but survived.

I’ve met a lot of those broken people. In a place like Newark, even after a historic drop in the crime rate, they weren’t hard to find. I interviewed a teenage girl with a slug lodged near her heart and a 7-year-old boy hit in the leg while he played on his porch. I know a hot-dog vendor who was shot in the gut by robbers and a grandmother struck by an errant bullet leaving church. One of my dearest friends is a man who got involved in a love triangle and paid for it with a gunshot that paralyzed him from the belly down.

I’ve talked to kids who have seen someone get shot; many of them are afraid to go outside, while others act as if it doesn’t bother them at all. I’ve met their neighbors, who live in a constant state of fear and mistrust. I’ve spent many hours with their suffering parents, people like Thaiquan, who desperately want their children to ride bikes on a warm spring Saturday evening without having to think about ducking and running.

Those stories don’t attract anywhere near the attention that murders receive. But I often think about them when there’s a mass shooting somewhere like Newtown, Conn., or Aurora, Colo., or Oak Creek, Wis., towns previously relatively untouched by gun violence. These unspeakable bursts of evil shred lives, families and communities, and the nation rightfully fixates on their grief and healing.

But for every one of those victimized towns, there are dozens of American cities where, every year, many more people are shot than in any single gun rampage. In those places — Newark, or New Orleans, where around 20 people were wounded last weekend when a gunman opened fire on a Mother’s Day parade — there is no definable healing process, because the violence never really stops. The number of dead, and the much larger number of those who return home with grievous injuries, grows every year. So does a deeper emotional trauma borne by their dispossessed communities.

It’s become so ingrained in the life of certain neighborhoods that even its victims, those who are most at risk, have little choice but to learn to live with it.

Police tape shouldn’t be a sign that it’s O.K. to go back outside and play.