The weekly GunFAIL compilations by David Waldman have a depressing quality to them. So many of them are about incidents that have a certain banality about them: people being stupid; people having accidents; people just being careless. Mind you, people can be like that about a lot of things, but guns seem to take it to another level.
But lets step aside from that and look at guns from another perspective. The second amendment paranoids are always screaming about guns in the hands of criminals and the need to be able to protect oneself, whether at home or out somewhere. What is it like to live in a city where multiple shooting incidents are a daily occurrence? Where the first responders and emergency rooms have it down to a routine? What you will find at the links in the rest of this piece is disturbing, but if you can stomach it, worth watching.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
The BBC does a tremendous service by doing news reports about America (and the rest of the world). There's a certain value in getting an outsider's perspective on things; if nothing else they may not have the same preconceptions that color reporting by domestic journalists. They may also have a particular expertise lacking in most reporters.
Frank Gardner is a BBC Security Correspondent; he recently did an extended story on the state with the highest murder rate in the country: California. At least 6 people are shot and wounded every day in Los Angeles county, around 25,000 gunshot wounds a year, not counting fatalities.
WARNING: the link below will take you an article and an embedded 14 minute video. It contains graphic descriptions of gunshot violence, and shows video taken in operating rooms of victims being operated on. It will take two clicks to start the video; the first gives you a warning and you need a second to continue. Another embedded video of about three minutes is a interview with a trauma surgeon, including scenes in the operating room. This is not for young children or people who may be traumatized by the images.
UPDATE: Judging by early poll results, no one is looking at the video. There's more there than just scenes in the operating room. If you are prepared for the images of violence, I think the video is well worth watching. It shows a reality we don't often get, in a professional manner distinct from the horror porn American news seems to be fixated on. I'm not taking back the warnings, but I do think what's there should be part of the debate.
The story is a look at
How Los Angeles surgeons cope in the gang war zone. It covers more than that, however. Gardner looks at the larger story of gang violence driving the violence, efforts to combat it, what it's like for survivors afterwards, and talks to Piers Morgan of CNN, who received death threats and
calls for deportation after he called for a gun ban following Sandy Hook.
Gardner himself is a victim of gunshot wounds that have left him in a wheelchair. In 2004 he was covering a story in Saudi Arabia about Al Qaeda militants, when he and his camera man came under attack. Gardner survived only because of then new trauma treatment; his camera man did not. Warning - there are graphic descriptions and images in the story of his reunion with the surgeon who saved his life. The story is here. A less violent story is that of his return to Saudi Arabia, with a rather interesting take on how the country is trying to avoid an Arab Spring, so far successfully.
There's a surreal moment in which Gardner and a gun shot survivor compare their scars. It's a demonstration of how people can bond over a shared experience - and a reminder for those of us who haven't been there, that personal experience can't be ignored.
The situation in Los Angeles is like a slow motion war; yet it's become... ordinary in a news sense. And, violence has actually been coming down in the last few years. (Kevin Drum has what may be a key factor in the drop over at Mother Jones.) It's still dangerous enough that the Navy sends corpsmen to train at an L.A. hospital before deployment. The irony of going to a city in 'peacetime' America to prepare for the battlefield is an indictment all by itself.
As Gardner's report notes:
Around half of all homicides are gang-related, and the Los Angeles Police Department estimates LA has 450 gangs and a total of 45,000 members, known as gangbangers.
-snip-
Andrew Blankstein, Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, says: "If you look at most of the crimes in LA and LA County, they're gun crimes.
"They're generally the result of warring gangs, over drugs, over turf, by people who either know each other or come across each other. Random, stranger-on-stranger crime that people fear the most is fairly remote here," he adds.
The major development in treating gun shot wounds, which has raised the survival rate, is the observation that the most important step is to stabilize the victim first, get them out of the initial trauma of the wounds to a point where they can be strong enough to survive the trauma of surgery to repair the damage. That insight, coupled with the creation of trauma center has made a critical difference. Again from the article:
Nowadays best practice is what they call "scoop and run" instead of "stay and play", meaning getting the injured person to the nearest trauma centre as fast as possible.
Another major change is in what happens once the patient is wheeled into the hospital.
In the past, surgeons would attempt full invasive surgery in the first 24 hours.
Damage control
"The patient would all be stitched up beautifully but then they would die. The body just couldn't take it," says Dr Inaba.
So now it is all about damage control and stabilisation, stopping the internal bleeding and leaving the fiddly until later.
My Observations, FWIW
What's happening every day in L.A. is about more than the Second Amendment versus Gun Control. On the one hand, it's difficult to see how more 'good guys with guns' would do anything except send more people to the trauma centers. On the other hand, California already has tough gun laws, and prisons so full they can't afford to operate them. Maybe we need to Think Different about Law & Order?
The War on Drugs has been going on for decades, and 'victory' is still nowhere in sight. The insistence of so many in America for turning every debate into some vast moral quandary - SIN - has kept us from looking at how other countries deal with the problem far more effectively by looking honestly at what works and what doesn't. The BBC has a report on how a worldwide epidemic of Hepatitis C is being exacerbated by the War on Drugs. It's akin to the same moral fervor behind the conviction that Austerity economic policies are the Right Thing To Do - despite all the evidence to the contrary.
With regard to L.A. what's needed is the realization that gang culture survives because of the failure of mainstream American culture to give these people an alternative to violence, fueled by illegal drug trafficking and the need to achieve a measure of status denied to them elsewhere. What's needed is the realization that the blind eye turned to this so long as it is limited largely to the disadvantaged is an evil in and of itself. The costs to society of policing, prisons, and emergency medical care, high as they are, are apparently seen as somehow 'better' than investing in job creation, education, community building, and a working social safety net. It might be useful to think just a bit about about the social justice aspects of guns and why people use them and/or feel the need for them.
And it might not be bad for America to take a wider view on other things as well.