He thumps his chest over the dropping homicide rate, when it is improved emergency medical care that is preventing more and more assaults from becoming homicides. The crime rate in New York is actually up.
From the Dec 8 Wall Street Journal:
In Medical Triumph, Homicides Fall Despite Soaring Gun Violence
……….Crime experts who attribute the drop in killings to better policing or an aging population fail to square the image of a more tranquil nation with this statistic: The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half…………
………Emergency-room physicians who treat victims of gunshot and knife attacks say more people survive because of the spread of hospital trauma centers—which specialize in treating severe injuries—the increased use of helicopters to ferry patients, better training of first-responders and lessons gleaned from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Our experience is we are saving many more people we didn’t save even 10 years ago,” said C. William Schwab, director of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the professor of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Post a Comment