Our California countdown is T-4 days. We fly from Logan to LAX on Friday night.
Recently, I read the Penn Medicine Alumni Magazine article about gun violence in Philadelphia. It made me remember a patient I helped take care of during my medical student trauma surgery rotation at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in February of 2006. I was on a shift in the trauma bay, and the patient was a young African-American man who had been shot in the chest. The surgery resident was putting in a chest tube, and the man – a boy, really – kept shouting “help me, help me, help me.” He was in severe pain, and it was so disturbing to watch.
The cover story, Gun Violence – A Reckoning, addresses the rise in fatal shootings in Philadelphia and nationwide. It calls for an “armistice” as more voices “join in unison” to stop the violence. One powerful voice from the article was that of Dr. Chidinma Nwakanma, assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine. Race, gun violence, political neglect – I suggest you read this series. We must stop the shooting, the deaths.
My only quarrel with the series is that it didn’t seem to go far enough. It didn’t get into the political failures of our nation’s leaders, the gun dealers, the NRA, and all of us for our silence and complicity. How can we translate our inertia into action?
I think it requires baby steps. A phone call to your congressperson. Reading up in the issue, for example the work of Professor David Hemenway.
Below, a video from yesterday in Jamaica Plain, the ringing of the First Church bells for the 900,000 COVID dead. Thanks for reading my blog entry! If you enjoyed this blog post, please feel free to leave a reply or share with others. And remember, my website is always free.
Philip A. Lederer 
Atlanta has been experiencing increased gun violence and street-racing and gun-running / shoot-out events. A DeKalb county police officer was shot near my house – after trying to stop a fast moving car that turned out to be filled with guns — purchased en masse at local gun shops for gangs in Chicago. Chicago is often cited by NRA folks as a failure — because that city has some of the most strict gun laws in the USA. The Chicago homicide rate by gun violence is still very high. The criminals, they say, will not respect such laws. But the truth is more complicated – in that there is an “Iron Pipeline” that extends from Georgia to NYC and Chicago. Georgia has some of the weakest gun laws in the USA and is now a magnet for gangs seeking to acquire weapons for use in other cities. These guns have also killed police in NYC and Chicago. NY Times wrote this article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/12/us/gun-traffickers-smuggling-state-gun-laws.html
Thanks for this…
Thanks
On Mon, Feb 14, 2022 at 6:35 AM Health and Healing wrote:
> Philip Lederer MD posted: ” Recently, I read the Penn Medicine Alumni > Magazine article about gun violence in Philadelphia. It made me remember a > patient I helped take care of during my trauma surgery rotation at the > Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in February of 2006. I ” >