Treating gunshot wounds on children was not what Mikael Petrosyan expected when he entered pediatrics.
Petrosyan has been working as a pediatric surgeon at the Children's National Hospital for more than a decade, and he has treated many children injured by guns.
He hasn't been able to save them all and has had to tell parents that their children have died from gunshot wounds.
"It's a devastating thing to do, to lose a child for something that has been caused by guns," Petrosyan said. "It's not an accident. It was totally preventable in many ways."
Last year, 106 juveniles were registered as gun shot wound victims in Washington D.C., and 16 of those incidents were fatal, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. Law enforcement in D.C. also recovered more than 3,000 firearms in both 2022 and 2023.