What Bullets Do to Bodies

[sheshe2]

*****This is a hard read****Warning.***** No graphic pictures, really, the words are hard enough to absorb. This is about the 30 years of work Dr Amy Goldberg and that of the trauma teams. I only posted a small bit, it is up to you if you want to continue to read.

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The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront everyday.

Photographs by
Finlay Mackay

The first thing Dr. Amy Goldberg told me is that this article would be pointless. She said this on a phone call last summer, well before the election, before a tangible sensation that facts were futile became a broader American phenomenon. I was interested in Goldberg because she has spent 30 years as a trauma surgeon, almost all of that at the same hospital, Temple University Hospital in North Philadelphia, which treats more gunshot victims than any other in the state and is located in what was, according to one analysis, the deadliest of the 10 largest cities in the country until last year, with a homicide rate of 17.8 murders per 100,000 residents in 2015.

Over my years of reporting here, I had heard stories about Temple’s trauma team. A city prosecutor who handled shooting investigations once told me that the surgeons were able to piece people back together after the most horrific acts of violence. People went into the hospital damaged beyond belief and came walking out.


That stuck with me. I wondered what surgeons know about gun violence that the rest of us don’t. We are inundated with news about shootings. Fourteen dead in San Bernardino, six in Michigan, 11 over one weekend in Chicago. We get names, places, anguished Facebook posts, wonky articles full of statistics on crime rates and risk, Twitter arguments about the Second Amendment—everything except the blood, the pictures of bodies torn by bullets. That part is concealed, sanitized. More than 30,000 people die of gunshot wounds each year in America, around 75,000 more are injured, and we have no visceral sense of what physically happens inside a person when he’s shot. Goldberg does.



http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/gun-violence/

[Hoyt]

1. Gunners don't care. In fact, many of them go out of their way to use ammo that expands and

fragments in the body. Some might try to rationalize it by saying, "oh that keeps me from killing other people with slugs that pass through." Others just laugh and dream of bending over a Trayvon Martin after shooting them with ammo that makes sure they are not only stopped (assuming they needed to be stopped), but will bleed to death.

Heck, the Geneva Convention requires military ammo to be non-expanding to prevent unnecessary bodily damage. Yet every gun loving cowboy in America probably has a box of something like these handy --

Marketed to gun humpers as Radically Invasive Projectiles (RIP)

[sheshe2]

2. I know they don't care, Hoyt.

Marketed to gun humpers as Radically Invasive Projectiles (RIP)

Sick.

I do appreciate what Goldberg has done over the past 30 years. I have no clue how she has been able to face all that for so long. I applaud them all for the steps that they have made.. before during and after treatment.

[Hoyt]

3. +1000000 on her work. Sometimes the callousness of Americans makes me ill, and nothing epitomizes

it more than gunners.

Here's to a better future in things like this.

[sheshe2]

4. Trust me, I feel the same as you, Hoyt.

On the callousness of Americans from NRA that promotes them, to the lawmakers, mostly white male, that refuse the most basic gun laws and the assholes that take glee in causing the most damage possible to another human being.

I do appreciate anyone that tries to make this better.