At the Pride March last weekend, fireworks set off in Washington Square Park sounded to some like gunshots, leading to a terrifying, chaotic stampede of hundreds of people.

“I ran in a panic, but didn’t understand what was happening,” said Marcela Paz Jara Martinez, who is visiting New York this summer from Chile. “I just looked for a place to hide. I saw a bunch of people on the floor being hurt … I thought I was going to die.”

 A week earlier, Carly Triche was on a downtown train stopped at West 4th Street when word quickly spread -- falsely, it turned out -- of a gunman. “Screaming, crying, I heard a lot of ‘holy shit, oh my God,’ that sort of panic,” she said. Triche joined a mass of people and fled the station to the street.

And in May, at the Barclays Center, a similarly false report of a shooting led to yet another stampede. Sixteen people were injured, police said. 

Mass shootings in the United States are so commonplace that the very fear of them is manifesting in panics like these, according to mental health and public safety experts. During July 4th weekend, given the possibility of mistaking fireworks for gunshots and the fact that the weekend often sees a real-life spike in violent crime, conditions can be ripe for frightening misunderstandings. 

“I do feel like our entire country right now is traumatized by the fact that it feels like a mass shooting can happen anywhere at any time,” said Jonathan Metzl, a psychiatrist and sociologist who is director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. “So I would say there is some sort of nationalized trauma happening right now.”

To read the rest of this story, go to Gothamist.com.