Three in five children who survive a shooting in America never receive a single mental health appointment afterward. They patch up the body, send you home, and wish you luck. California is now trying to do something about that, and the story of how this bill came to exist is exactly as grim as you'd expect.
Shot Four Blocks From Home, Then Left to Figure It Out Alone
Marvin Pérez was 23 years old when someone drove past him on a street four blocks from his Oakland home and shot him multiple times in the left leg. He'd moved to California from Guatemala with his family hoping for a better life. Instead, he spent three months doing physical therapy with a bullet still lodged in his leg because doctors couldn't remove it.
The physical recovery was brutal. The psychological aftermath was worse. The Guardian reports that Pérez spent his days consumed by thoughts of the shooting and his nights trapped in nightmares about it. He felt like he had nobody to talk to. He carried all of it alone, in silence, the way too many young survivors are quietly expected to do.
Eventually, Pérez connected with Youth Alive, an Oakland-based gun violence intervention nonprofit. He got counseling. He got a person who listened without judgment. "It was a turning point in my life," he told The Guardian in Spanish. He's now 25, and he's one of the lucky ones. Most kids don't find their way to that turning point. Most don't find their way anywhere.
The Birthday Party Massacre That Helped Spark a Bill
The Thrive Act didn't come out of nowhere. Part of its origin is a mass shooting at a child's birthday party in Stockton, California, last year. Three children, ages 8, 9 and 14, were killed. A 21-year-old was also killed. Eleven more people were injured. A birthday party. Let that sit for a second.
After that shooting, the advocacy group Californians for Safety and Justice brought the idea of expanded mental healthcare access to Assemblymember Sade Elhawary, a Democrat whose district covers parts of south Los Angeles that have been hammered by gun violence for years. The result is the Thrive Act: Trauma Healing and Resilience Investment for Victimized and Exposed Youth Act.
The bill would create a pilot program offering counseling and mental health resources to anyone under 25 who has been shot, lost a family member to gun violence, or witnessed a shooting. Critically, according to The Guardian, it would be available regardless of immigration status. It would operate in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Solano and Alameda counties, all of which have high rates of gun deaths. Elhawary coauthored the bill with Democratic assemblymembers Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, Mialisa Bonta and Maggy Krell.
The Numbers Are Ugly and Everyone Already Knows It
About 5,000 children are injured or killed by firearms every year in the United States, according to research from the University of Texas Medical Branch cited by The Guardian. Firearm violence is still the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in this country. Homicide rates in major cities have declined over the past five years, which is genuinely good news, but that decline hasn't erased the crisis and it sure hasn't reached every neighborhood equally.
Nicole Kravitz-Wirtz, an associate professor at the UC Davis Centers for Violence Prevention, told The Guardian that surviving a shooting can derail a young person's life for years through post-traumatic stress, anxiety, hyper-vigilance, substance abuse and emotional dysregulation. These effects don't exist in a vacuum either. They pile on top of poverty, family stress and housing instability that are already common in the neighborhoods bearing the highest rates of gun violence.
Black and Latino communities face every layer of this at once: disproportionate exposure to gun violence, fewer mental health providers in their neighborhoods, less financial resources to access care, and the cultural stigma that still surrounds seeking help. Gabriel Garcia, Youth Alive's policy and advocacy director, told The Guardian that young survivors are currently expected to "navigate a complicated bureaucracy, stacks of paperwork" just to get seen. The system, in other words, treats trauma like a DMV errand.
The Bill Passed the Assembly. Now Comes the Hard Part.
The Thrive Act has already passed the California Assembly floor and is now under review by the Senate health and judiciary committee. Elhawary told The Guardian that support for the bill itself isn't really the problem. The problem is money. Pilot mental health programs cost money, and California's budget right now is not exactly flush.
So Elhawary is doing the unglamorous work of convincing legislators and county officials that this is not just the right thing to do but a viable thing to do. She's making the case that breaking the cycle of trauma is also, in cold practical terms, breaking the cycle of violence. "We're ensuring that we're not continuing the cycle of violence because oftentimes folks see that their mode of coping is retaliation," she told The Guardian.
That framing matters. This isn't a soft argument about feelings. It's an argument that untreated trauma in communities with high gun violence rates creates the conditions for more gun violence. Treating the psychological wound isn't just compassionate, it's strategic. Whether that argument cuts through a budget fight is a different question entirely.
The Dingo Take
Here is what three in five actually means. Walk into a room of ten shooting survivors. Six of them never saw a therapist. Six of them got their bullet wound treated and then got sent back into their lives. Their schools. Their blocks. Their nightmares. The country that produced the conditions for their shooting offered them exactly nothing for what happened inside their heads afterward. And we wonder why generational cycles of violence are hard to break.
The Thrive Act is a pilot program. It covers four counties. It still needs funding. It is not a solution to American gun violence, and nobody is pretending it is. But it is a concrete, specific attempt to catch people who are currently falling through a gap so wide you could drive a truck through it. The fact that it took a mass shooting at an 8-year-old's birthday party to help generate the political will for something this basic tells you everything you need to know about where mental healthcare sits in this country's list of priorities.
California will probably pass this. It will probably work in the limited way pilot programs work. And then the hard question becomes whether anyone else is watching. Because the three-in-five number doesn't just apply to California. That's a national number. That's every state, every city, every kid who caught a bullet and then caught silence.
