At the E.R., Bearing Witness to Gun Violence

A doctor and clinical researcher exposes the truth of the horrors of gun violence in American emergency rooms.

The following article was published by The New York Times on January 1, 2013:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/o...-violence.html

At the E.R., Bearing Witness to Gun Violence
By DAVID H. NEWMAN

THERE is an unspoken rule in medicine: we do not tell tales out of school.

As an emergency room physician, an Army veteran who was deployed to a combat support hospital in Baghdad in 2005, and a biomedical researcher in the field of cardiac-arrest resuscitation, I have been and am, on a daily basis, a witness to grave misfortune. Ordinarily, though, except for medical purposes, I will not discuss what I have seen.

Last week a colleague asked me to make an exception. The father of two young children, he was moved by the rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., to ask his professional circle to reconsider our silence. I am an expectant father, and his words resonated with me. They reminded me that we doctors are at the front lines of the scourge of gun violence, and that to remain silent as this threat to public health continues unabated would be no different than for an oncologist or a cardiologist to stay mum on the dangers of smoking.

The doctor’s balance between discretion and education is complex. But the news from Newtown, and my colleague’s request, convinced me that we have reached the threshold. I can no longer stay silent.
Here is just some of what I have seen over the years. In Baghdad, I saw a 5-year-old girl who was shot in the head while in her car seat. Her father, who knew she was dying before I said it, wept in my arms, as bits of her body clung to his shirt.

Much of the gun violence I have seen, though, I have seen on home soil, here in the United States. There was a 9-year-old girl, shot in the chest by an assault rifle during a “drive-by” gang shooting, in a botched retaliation for a shooting earlier that day. She was baffled, and in pain, with a gaping hole under her collarbone.
I have also seen an 8-year-old who found a shotgun in the closet while playing with a friend. The two boys pointed the weapon at each other a number of times before the gun accidentally discharged. The 8-year-old arrived in my emergency department with most of his face blown off. Miraculously, he survived.

Another child I will never forget was a 13-year-old who was shot twice in the abdomen by an older boy who mistook him for one of a group that had bullied and berated him a week earlier. Slick with sweat and barely conscious, he groaned and turned to look at me. Soon after, he died in the operating room. His mother arrived minutes later, wide-eyed and breathless.

I do not know exactly what measures should be taken to reduce gun violence like this. But I know that most homicides and suicides in America are carried out with guns. Research suggests that homes with a gun are two to three times more likely to experience a firearm death than homes without guns, and that members of the household are 18 times more likely to be the victim than intruders.

I know that in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available, nearly 400 American children (age 14 and under) were killed with a firearm and nearly 1,000 were injured. That means that this week we can expect 26 more children to be injured or killed with a firearm.

Emergency rooms are themselves volatile environments, not immune to violence. Over the last decade, a quarter of gun crimes in American E.R.’s were committed with guns wrested from armed guards.

I have sworn an oath to heal and to protect humans. Guns, invented to maim and destroy, are my natural enemy.

Sally Cox, a school nurse in Newtown, told Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” that when state troopers led her out of the school after the mass shooting they instructed her to cover her eyes. This was humane, and right. But some of us see every day what no one should, ever. If the carnage remains undiscussed, we risk complacency about an American epidemic — one that is profoundly difficult, but necessary, to watch, and to confront. That is why I bear witness.

David H. Newman is the director of clinical research in the department of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Ed.

Take a look at more of your kind of thinking in our history. Sad to say history will repeat itself once the so called "intellegencia" take control. If you are not worried, you should be.

With practically all debate and discussion in the U.S. dominated by the recent election, guns, money and liberty, I have found four quotes from historical figures that, I believe, explain the throes of freedom’s extinction facing America.

Quote No. 1 – Josef Stalin: “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.” While you will find some people who dispute the accuracy and authenticity of this statement, it rings with truth. And, for that reason, it’s critical Americans don’t forget the lesson it offers those of us who live in the nation most responsible for the concept of putting the power in the hands of the people. That’s why vote fraud, in all its many forms, must remain on the minds of freedom-minded Americans before we participate in another national election in 2014. Do you believe vote fraud was a factor in the 2012 election? Do you believe identification of voters is an essential component of free and fair elections? Do you believe candidates for federal office should be severely punished – or even disqualified – for knowingly taking foreign contributions? Do you believe there should be independent enforcement authorities for preventing and punishing those who cast fraudulent votes and for those who encourage and facilitate them? Do you believe the constitutional standards of eligibility for candidates and voters should be enforced? If you do, what are you going to do about it? If a tea-party movement arises again in 2013, the integrity of our elections needs to be a top priority on its agenda. If it is not, I am convinced we will never have a free and fair national election again.
Quote No. 2 – Mayer Amschel Rothschild: “Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes the laws.” It’s a fact that Americans voted in 2010 to get control of America’s money supply and government spending. Stunned by skyrocketing debt, they turned out many entrenched members of Congress in favor of those promising to do something about it. Yet nothing was done to address the problems. The Federal Reserve was not audited. The record borrowing continued unabated with the approval of the overwhelming majority of members of Congress of both parties. And this year Washington decided to continue on its path off the fiscal cliff. Who controls the money supply in America today? The big bankers. Congress long ago abdicated its authority. It’s time to elect a Congress that will take it back, or America will cease to be a nation under the rule of law and governed by the will of the people.

Quote No. 3 –Mao Zedong: “All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The Communist Party must command all the guns; that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.” The U.S. government, cheered on by a lapdog media, is scrambling to seize the latest opportunity to violate the second component of the Bill of Rights to establish, in the long run, a monopoly on armed force for the governing class in Washington. This is a necessary condition before tyranny can be imposed on the people. History records it was done in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Communist China and every other totalitarian police state and that each of those actions led inevitably to holocausts of unimaginable size and scope. Will America go the way of those tyrannies and open the gates for the potential of genocide? This new year will be a critical turning point one way or the other.

Quote No. 4 – Bill Clinton: “When we got organized as a country, [and] wrote a fairly radical Constitution, with a radical Bill of Rights, giving radical amounts of freedom to Americans, it was assumed that Americans who had that freedom would use it responsibly. … When personal freedom is being abused, you have to move to limit it.” This one summarizes all the major threats we face as a nation. Will we choose liberty? Or will we choose tyranny? Will we choose the false promise of “safety and security”? Or will we choose the freedom that comes with self-governance, self-determination, individual liberty and responsibility? Will we as a people be accountable to God? Or will we make ourselves accountable only to the false god of unlimited government?

Read more at https://www.wnd.com/2013/01/4-quotes...mvqiuT4ahxb.99