I think we all have some degree of childhood trauma, though we all experienced different degrees of it. I wouldn't wish mine on my worst enemy, but what really matters is what we do with our lives afterward.
But can a specific kind of trauma accelerate aging?
That's what a study highlighted in The Trace tries to claim.
Research has consistent shown that cigarette smoking, chronic stress, and a sedentary lifestyle can speed up a person’s biological clock. A new study suggests that aging may also be accelerated by exposure to gun violence, a finding that exposes the hidden toll of trauma.In a report published in the September volume of SSM-Population Health, researchers showed how exposure to deadly neighborhood shootings affected nearly 1,800 15-year-olds. They found that over half of the teenagers in the sample lived near at least one deadly shooting in the prior year, and those exposed to gun violence showed an estimated two-and-a-half-month difference in biological age acceleration and a 5.3 percent faster pace of aging. To measure for aging, the study’s authors used three highly regarded epigenetic clocks — biochemical tests that estimate a body’s biological age.
“It’s very easy for folks to say, ‘Well, this doesn’t directly affect me and doesn’t directly affect a lot of people,’ when in fact, we know from studies like this — and many that preceded this — that those early life exposures, where living in close proximity to where an incident of gun violence happens, can have real long-term implications for young people as they age,” said Julia Fleckman, an author of the study and an associate public health professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
To assess the adolescents’ exposure to gun violence, the researchers used survey data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a long-running longitudinal study of nearly 5,000 children born between 1998 and 2000. They defined neighborhood-level gun violence as the number of fatal shootings within one mile of respondents’ homes in the prior year.
The problem I have here is that they only looked at the trauma of being exposed to so-called gun violence. What about other kinds of trauma? Surviving a fatal car crash, for example, could have a similar effect. Hell, just having watched the Twin Towers fall on 9/11 could well have aged kids. Maybe the reason Gen X is the way that we are is because we all watched the Challenger explode in our classrooms.
That's a problem I have with this study, based on what we see, but it's far from the only one.
See, another issue is that the definition of "living near" a shooting was just living within a mile of one. While a mile isn't exactly a marathon, which needs 26.2 of them, it's also not like the shooting is happening next door. From a mile away, you don't necessarily know something even happened, much less be traumatized by it.
And if you're not traumatized by it, what else could account for this aging?
Oh, they didn't think to look.
See, like an earlier study from 2025 that The Trace linked to this one, it appears they were so laser-focused on so-called gun violence that they didn't seem to think to look for any other potential variables, like poverty. High-violence neighborhoods tend to also be the poorest neighborhoods. Poverty creates serious difficulties for children, which may well do enough on its own to create any trauma-based aging.
I don't mind people looking at the impact of violence on young people. I don't mind it at all. I think it's probably important research.
What I mind is when they lock onto the chance to make anti-gun argument with their research and don't actually look for the truth. That's what science is supposed to be about.
