"I was shot in the throat with a .38 caliber bullet."
The crowd in a midsize seminar space on the NYU Langone Health medical campus snaps to attention with those 11 words. Even drowsy surgical residents—tired from either a long night on call or an early morning before their shift—slide phones into pockets or backpacks. All focus is on the man at the podium.
Joseph Sakran, BSPH '03 (MPH), gets right to the point.
Life, after all, can change in an instant. Sakran knows. An act of gun violence almost stripped him of his nearly two decades of service as a trauma surgeon before it even started.
He relives that experience every day at work. Earlier this year, a man with a gunshot wound to the chest arrived on Sakran's table at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Sakran cut open his torso, revealing an engorged heart and a barely conspicuous hole in the pericardium, the organ's outer lining. The man should have been dead, but he clung to life. Sakran cut into the pericardium, nicking a clot to spring a fountain of blood into the air between his face and the wound. By removing the clot, blood flow returned to normal, preventing damage to vital organs and tissues. All Sakran had to do next was suture the heart to control the bleeding. The victim was going to live.
Sakran carries with him—and often shares—such memories. Patients and their families are always front of mind.
"I want to be able to save people from dying, but I also want to prevent them from having to go through these terrible scenarios," Sakran says. He can only save so many lives in the OR. He means to prevent gunshot wounds before they even happen.
Today, Sakran is at Grand Rounds—a weekly college-style lecture for surgical residents and interested staff—presenting "Gun Violence in America: How Health Care Workers Can Drive Social Change." It's a talk he's delivered to dozens of audiences to encourage medical workers to take political action. Tomorrow, he'll be on multiple television networks speaking for gun control. And next week, he'll be at a board meeting for This Is Our Lane, a grassroots movement he founded that amplifies the voices of health care workers on the front line of the gun violence epidemic.
No matter the medium, Sakran is buzzing in the ears of pro-gun groups, even as their supporters try to swat him with hate-fueled social media posts and threatening letters. Because, as someone who almost became a statistic, he knows what gun violence can do to a person, to a family, to a community. And he won't stop until he's standing by America's bedside when it wakes up, finally healed from its self-inflicted wounds.
A few weeks before the Grand Rounds, Sakran and I were scheduled to talk, but he was called into surgery. That's the nature of the gig. On a daily basis he confronts life-or-death situations, including doing his best to heal some of those affected by the 867 shootings (219 fatal) that occurred in Baltimore in 2023 alone. The fact that he can be called into the OR at any moment makes it even more impressive that he has time to give speeches, write essays for The Atlantic, and work directly with government officials and legislators.
"I don't know when he sleeps," jokes Kris Brown, president of Brady, a gun control and anti-gun violence nonprofit for which Sakran serves as board chair and chief medical officer.
He likely caught more z's before 2018, when he became a national name in the most 21st-century way possible. On Nov. 7 of that year, Sakran responded to the National Rifle Association on Twitter (now X) after the organization published a tweet telling doctors who advocated against gun violence to "stay in their lane."
As a Trauma Surgeon and survivor of #GunViolence I cannot believe the audacity of the @NRA to make such a divisive statement.
— Joseph Sakran (@JosephSakran) November 7, 2018
We take care of these patients everyday. Where are you when I'm having to tell all those families their loved one has died. @DocsDemand #Docs4GunSense https://t.co/XrY1G3hIi2
"As a Trauma Surgeon and survivor of gun violence I cannot believe the audacity of the @NRA to make such a divisive statement," he tweeted, racking up 23,000 more likes than the NRA's original post. "We take care of these patients every day. Where are you when I'm having to tell all those families their loved one has died?"
Some people replied with malice and disagreement. But many others—doctors and nondoctors, gun owners and nonowners—agreed publicly that gun violence is the lane of physicians, who treat the nearly 100,000 people wounded by guns in the U.S. in an average year. Yes, for every individual who dies, more than two survive, according to research from the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation. But surgeons, nurses, and doctors can't save everyone, and more than 40,000 will die every year. In 2023, on average, 118 people a day died from a gun-related incident.
The levees broken, Sakran later that year launched This Is Our Lane. Over the past six years, it has grown from a Twitter account that amplified medical voices to an integral activist arm of Brady. But its mission stayed the same: help the public realize that gun violence is preventable when viewed from a three-pronged medical, public health, and policy approach.
"People think [gun violence] is such an intractable issue," says Cassandra Crifasi, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University. "There's this real pessimism, both that we don't know what works and that no one will ever agree on it, and so we're never going to make progress."
Rather than calling it pessimism, Sakran and Brown both name the bogeyman "hopelessness," that resigned it-is-what-it-is sigh. But the research conducted by Crifasi and the Center for Gun Violence Solutions proves the opposite. In fact, most Americans are on the same page about guns.
In its most recent national public opinion polls, the center found that 72% of U.S. adults support firearm licensing, including 60% of gun owners. Seventy-two percent of Americans support laws that require a person to lock up the guns in their home when not in use, including 58% of gun owners. Sixty-nine percent support funding community-based gun violence prevention programs, including 62% of gun owners. And only 23% support allowing a person who legally owns a gun to carry a loaded concealed handgun in public without having to obtain a concealed carry license. Such stats are demographically diverse, as a high percentage of those polled were gun owners and Black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans.
"It's not an 'us versus them,'" Sakran says, scrubbing the imaginary two-party line that so often splits the nation. "It's us and them, working together. Most Americans have a lot more in common than divides them."
The center describes actionable solutions on its website, mainly focused on gun safety regulations and community violence intervention. Less actionable is how to change seemingly fixed hearts and minds.
"There has been an exceptionally effective narrative from the gun lobby that the best way to defend yourself is a firearm," Crifasi says. More recently, she continues, that's evolved to the notion that guns are the only way to protect yourself.
"Unfortunately, there's not a clear counternarrative," Crifasi says, expressing that simply saying "guns are dangerous" won't change minds. Quite the opposite, she says—such a statement might turn off gun owners who are potential allies to gun control causes, as evidenced in the center's opinion polls.
So, how can the story of gun violence be shaped by those affected most? By telling it until it can no longer be ignored.
"Something that Dr. Sakran does, which no other surgeon does quite as well, is tell his story as a way of inspiring people to make change," says NYU general surgery resident Sarah Kaslow—who first met Sakran while completing her master's in public health at Johns Hopkins—after the Grand Rounds. She calls him "someone who can take something huge and break it down into smaller parts that are actionable."
While finishing his fellowship at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, Sakran led West Philadelphia high school students through a tour of the hospital's trauma ward, where gun violence victims are lost or saved daily. He noticed that "like most kids, they were listening, but not really," he says, their eyes glazing over as the nice man in the white coat talked at them about gun violence and the very real threat that claimed 284 lives in Philadelphia that year.
How can I reach them? he wondered. How could he let them know that he knew firsthand that gun violence victims weren't numbers and statistics, but moms, dads, uncles, aunts, cousins, siblings, and neighbors?
Sakran, more so than any other doctor these kids had met, understood the story of gun violence. Because he is that story. Before the degrees, the accolades, the prestigious positions, the national influence, he experienced the exact kind of tragic violence that changes lives, that ruins families, that plagues cities, that now defines the brittle state of American public health. And so, for the first time, surrounded by the trauma ward's beeping equipment and bathed in the white fluorescence that lit hundreds of past surgeries, he told his story to those who most needed to hear it.
It was the night of Sept. 23, 1994, at a dimly lit playground in Burke, Virginia. Bright lights flashed from a distance. Then Sakran's body numbed as time slowed. The crowd dispersed as he stumbled, dazed, toward a nearby curb. What just happened? Right, right, he was just at the homecoming football game. In the stands with his buddies. The group, buzzed on adrenaline after watching the Lake Braddock Bruins trounce their opponent, drove a little ways away to White Oaks Elementary School to hang out.
He couldn't breathe. Not like earlier, when he breathlessly dashed to his room after an SAT prep course to change clothes for the game, not stopping to answer his parents' questions about the class. He hurriedly tossed on a white T-shirt and white jeans. As he rushed out the door, his father called out, "Be careful. Don't be home late."
Blood gushed from his throat, coloring his outfit a deep burgundy. Those flashes were gunshots from a rapidly emptied clip of .38 caliber bullets—one of which ruptured his windpipe. A friend called 911 and hailed passing cars for help as Sakran struggled to get air into his lungs.
A Fairfax County, Virginia, police chopper fluttered onto the scene as paramedics rushed him onto a stretcher, only to realize that he couldn't lie supine or he'd choke on his own blood. With no room for upright passengers in the helicopter, they led him to an ambulance, where he observed from above, out of body, his corporeal self dying on the gurney.
"I still remember the medics asking me questions," he says. "And I watched myself answer them."
The sirens roared along the highway as he fretted about a pack of cigarettes he forgot he had. I gotta get these out of my pocket, he thought. My parents will kill me. But the smokes stayed in place as the ambulance reached Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia, the terrified 17-year-old greeted by a gaggle of white coats who didn't quite know what to do with him. At the time, the hospital's trauma surgeons weren't in-house, so the doctors had to wait until qualified personnel arrived.
After what felt like hours, a strong-willed doctor burst into the trauma bay. Disgusted with the lack of haste, he berated the group with a hard-effed, 'What the fuck is going on here?' before unlocking Sakran's gurney and wheeling it into the operating room himself.
"Joe," surgeon Robert Ahmed said, leaning over the fading teen's face, "I have to do this to save your life."
Sakran passed out and the doctors went to work. They repaired his ruptured windpipe. Vascular surgeon Dipankar "D" Mukherjee swiped a vein from Sakran's leg to patch up the injured carotid artery. He luckily suffered no strokes, and though his vocal cords were temporarily paralyzed, his spine and brain were unharmed.
Shit, I'm going to be late for work, Sakran thought when he awoke the next day. He was supposed to start his first real job at the nearby Herschel Family Pet Center at noon sharp. But then he noticed the distraught family members surrounding him and the ventilator on his face. And—oh no—those cigarettes. They were probably still in his blood-stained clothes, folded in a heap awaiting discharge from the hospital, the carton crusted with blood. But that was the least of anyone's concerns. He had been shot and nearly killed, but with scalpels and clamps in hand, trauma surgeons willed him to keep living.
Sakran didn't discover who fired the bullets until later. Detectives told him it might've been a gang initiation ceremony. Probably MS-13, but they didn't know for sure. The shooter, just a year younger than Sakran, forever altered his own life by pulling that trigger.
As Sakran recovered in the hospital, a healthy high school senior turned collateral damage, his perspective changed. "I came to the realization that I had this second chance. How do I take that second chance and provide that to other people?" he says.
Sakran clenched that second chance and never let go. Med school, residency (where he worked at the hospital that saved him, with the very men who healed him, Ahmed and Mukherjee), and fellowships followed, all the while maintaining his fervor for helping people.
"My parents came to this country looking for those similar hopes and dreams that so many of us strive for," he says of Victor and Nuhad Sakran, Palestinian and Lebanese immigrants who moved to Virginia before he was born. "They didn't have a lot. But what they did know was the importance of an education and how that was critical to ensure we have a better life."
Education is one part of him, but strong, lasting relationships are another. Brown, president of Brady, calls herself his honorary sister. His patients and their families show up to award ceremonies and speaking events to support him. His fiancée, Francesca Ioffreda, says that "anyone who meets him automatically feels seen, heard, and loved." Everyone he knows is "brother," "bud," or some nickname that balloons his inner circle.
After those NYU Grand Rounds, he's surrounded like a high school basketball player that just hit a buzzer beater, the dozen or so people wanting a second to talk shop, ask what they can do. He comes off as the kind of guy who, after he leaves a restaurant, knows the names of all the servers, hosts, and bartenders—and maybe even a cook or two in the back of house.
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Ioffreda says it's "just who Joe is," someone who will drive the two or three hours in miserable traffic from Baltimore to Fairfax just to catch a minute of his nieces' and nephews' swim meets or who remembers to bring his future father-in-law's favorite pie when they visit.
Post-rounds, Sakran and I sit down to chat in a sunny, green courtyard adjacent to the meeting room, a paper Dunkin' cup on the table between us. It's not his normal coffee order, he promises; it was the only place open when he left his hotel. He usually weighs and grinds the beans himself at home, a precise morning ritual that energizes him enough to move through days full of the surgeries, conferences, phone calls (two of the latter happening right in front of me), and political activism that have defined the last decade.
Even before This Is Our Lane, he was a leading voice in Doctors for Hillary, a group that supported Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential run. He graduated from working with candidates and went on to work for presidents, successfully helping the Biden administration establish the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention in September 2023. Recently, he's been credited with having helped push U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to declare gun violence a major U.S. public health crisis.
"Regardless of the social issue that you're passionate about—whether it's abortion, gun violence, COVID, or racism—they're so interconnected. Health care professionals have realized that, yes, their role is to be good doctors, to be competent surgeons, to take care of those patients," he says. "But a lot of us, especially the next generation of health care leaders in America, understand [our] ability to have a role beyond the bedside. And more importantly, we want to be part of the fabric of our communities."
In February, in a small but crowded room at Johns Hopkins, a black-suited Sakran crossed a stage with his arms clasped in front of him. Across the room, a long table held plastic champagne flutes and a white frosted cake bearing the JHU crest separating the phrases "Congratulations Joe" and "President's Frontier Award." Sweeter than the confection was the $250,000 check university President Ron Daniels awarded to Sakran. To those in the room, it was an obvious choice. But when Sakran opened his mouth to speak, surprise and humility flowed out.
"Dr. John Cameron said to me this morning, 'Congratulations!'" Sakran said to the crowd, referring to the school's former chief of surgery. "I said, 'What are you talking about?'"
Polite chuckles followed, but low-key reaction aside, it's a big deal. The President's Frontier Award is one of Johns Hopkins' most prestigious, a hefty monetary and honorary prize given annually to a faculty member who demonstrates significant scholarly achievement and shows exceptional promise for important future endeavors.
Sakran has already put that money to work. He'll soon add "author" to his list of accomplishments, as he's working on a book to tell his story and share his perspectives on health care worker advocacy.
He's also working with the university to create a fellowship program that helps medical professionals sharpen their scalpels in other ways, namely to organize for whatever cause they champion—whether that's reproductive rights, climate change, immigration, or something else entirely.
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He's getting married, too. In September, he says with a content smile, right in Baltimore. Wedding planning, on top of everything else.
Over the course of our conversations, I try to figure out how a man with so many big responsibilities can really "do it all." He tells me his four P's (Purpose, Passion, Patience, Perseverance) and Nine Whys (a series of questions that are meant to help people find their motivations, popularized by Simon Sinek's self-help book Start With Why). But it escapes me, no matter what alliterative anecdotes I jot down.
Until, during our interview in New York, after the effusive apologies for the interrupting phone calls, he puts his phone away and leans well over the table, craning his neck toward the surface and hunching his body. It's then that I realize he can't speak any louder—his vocal cords are doing the best they can, decades after the bullet. He leaned directly over my phone, which is recording the conversation, to ensure it picked up every syllable. There it was, the secret. Amid a million duties, Sakran is telling you his story. Not a room of high school kids, not a lecture hall of students, not a national TV audience. He's talking directly to you. And that story, full of exasperating violence and relentless determination, will be heard, digested, and forever front of mind when you watch the news, read an article, or experience gun violence yourself. Maybe it'll change your mind. Maybe it'll reinforce your preexisting thoughts. But you'll never forget it. And in the same way, he'll never forget you.
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