But, Kafka said, there isn't any focus on what happens to the victims who were shot and survived.
"I've never seen where they follow the rehab of somebody," he said.
Kafka said gun victims often become disabled. But if you want to know how often this happens, or if you want any sort of data on this, there's not really anything out there.
"We've never tracked that in the disability world,” Kafka said. “What is the percentage of people who have their disability … because of gun violence.”
Kafka wants to change that, so he sent ADAPT members the informal poll about whether they’d became disabled because of gun violence. Kafka said he hopes that information will help his group be better lobbyists and have more influence on Texas lawmakers.
"I think it would be helpful for the public in designing whatever programs in terms of gun control, security, what the balance is," Kafka explains. "And I think the disability community should be an integral part of that debate."
The reason Kafka and his group have to go out and get information is because gun violence data is something that doesn't exist in the public health world.
"The National Rifle Association, in particular, worked very hard to stop research coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and even some of our other federal agencies," said Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association.
Benjamin said for the past two decades, this prohibition on data collection has stopped public health officials from studying gun violence in any meaningful way.
"We just haven't done the research to really have really good questions and really good answers to those questions," he said. "I think the challenge is that when almost every other important public policy decision, we make it out on informed data as best we can."
Benjamin said it's a good thing groups are trying to collect data on their own and any data at this point helps. But to really improve public policy better, he said, officials need robust scientific studies.
