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| Dr. Arthur Berg at work, left. |
Outside the restaurant, a dispute among two groups in the crowd. Someone squeezed a trigger; 10 people were hit. A few minutes later, while Berg was sprinting on the treadmill, his phone rang.
It was about 8:30 p.m. Berg, who grew up in Oak Brook, had already worked a full day, starting 10 a.m., ending 7:30 p.m., removing two gallbladders and performing an appendectomy. But he left the gym and hurried to his central Miami hospital — he asked me not to specify which — answering the all-hands-on-deck signal they call a “mass casualty event.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not a very uncommon thing around here,” said Berg, doing his fellowship in trauma and surgical critical care. “I don’t know what it’s like in Chicago. But down here in Miami, the gun restrictions are a lot looser, and we see our fair share of pretty horrendous injuries. We’re talking about massive soft tissue injuries. We’re talking about shattered bones. We’re talking about mangled extremities.”
While legislators argue over defining “assault rifle” — a ban on such weapons passed the Illinois House on Friday and this week goes to the state Senate, where it is expected to pass — Berg has no trouble parsing the distinction. He knows right away what kind of gun made the wounds he’s struggling to treat.
“From a handgun you see a small aperture, in-and-out,” he said. “When you get shot with something like an assault rifle, these high-caliber rifles cause these really destructive injuries.”
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How anyone can support the sale of these weapons of war to US citizens confounds me. The only reason they exist is to kill and maim other human beings. I never thought I'd look back at the days of the Saturday Night Special as benign.
ReplyDeleteWhen I brought patients to the unnamed hospital to which the doctor referred when I was a paramedic during the Cocaine Cowboy era, most gunshot wounds were from handguns. Many of the wounds were more than small apertures and did quite a bit of damage. It was bad guys shooting other bad guys at close range with big handguns.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes the assault rifles so insidious is not only the severity of the wounds but also the large number of rounds they can carry and the range from which they reach their targets.
Not to speak of the number of people that inevitably get shot even though they're not "targets."
Deletejohn
Someday, just maybe, we can get the right legislation pushed through but I don't see it happening anytime soon.
ReplyDeleteThe final paragraph sums it up. Someone needs to convince the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or Warren Buffett to fund some research on those issues.
ReplyDeleteThese guns from Indiana are everywhere.
ReplyDeleteIf only Indiana had sensible gun laws, the country's load would be lightened.