Firearms are the mechanism of injury in about 61,000 emergency room visits per year. There are many items in your home that are more dangerous.
- Floors: 2.135 million hospital visits
- Stairs or steps: 1.027 million hospital visits
- Beds or bed frames: 912,000 hospital visits
- Bathtubs or showers: 431,000 hospital visits
- Tables: 327,000 hospital visits
- Chairs: 319,000 hospital visits
- Interior ceilings and walls: 293,000 hospital visits
- Sofas, couches, davenports, divans, or studio couches: 211,000 hospital visits
- Rugs or carpets: 206,000 hospital visits
- Toilets: 204,000 hospital visits
Assuming that you don’t want to commit suicide and also assuming that you aren’t a criminal, you are far more likely to be injured in a fall than you are by a firearm. Anecdotally, my hospital only sees about 1 patient a month with injuries from gunshot wounds. Just yesterday, I saw three patients with broken bones from falling in their home.
6 Comments
foot in the forest · March 1, 2024 at 12:51 pm
Facts have no business in how a liberal feels about guns, besides it’s for the children.
Cederq · March 1, 2024 at 3:34 pm
I would say that the figures presented was accurate to my experience. I did not work ER a lot, but in twenty years of nursing I only admitted and treated 2 gunshot victims and that is with a hospital directly south of a predominantly black ghetto area of Portland, Oregon.
W Wilson · March 1, 2024 at 4:38 pm
How many people die because mistakes that the medical field makes? I’ve heard that it is in the hundreds of thousands , just saying.
Aesop · March 3, 2024 at 1:31 pm
@W Wilson,
The actual number is so low, that any published number had to be entirely pulled right out of someone’s clenched hindquarters. And is, exactly so.
Any number you read in literature is thus entirely made-up, and no actual data exists. Anything you read purporting to be such a number is almost as accurate as deaths from second-hand smoke, and from global warming.
Bear that in mind every time you read any such mythical number.
After 30+ years in the business, I can point to…two, that I know of. Out of perhaps 250,000 patients I’ve cared for or been in contact with in that period of time.
And to break those numbers down:
Nearly 30 years total practice, but 23 years in the ER x 52 weeks/yr x 3 shifts/wk x 75 pts (averaged) patients/shift.
So that’s a medical error death rate of 0.000008%, for Emergency medicine/trauma, which in all probability has a higher death rate than any department in any hospital.
(There were far more deaths, but only the two I can point to and tell you with high certainty those two were because medical staff effed up, and someone died. IOW, about one death every 15 years.)
There are approximately 139,800,000 ED visits per year, and roughly 300,000 deaths in all US EDs per year, so if my anecdotal 0.000008% deaths per pt. data holds across the board, that would make about 1100 of those 300,000 deaths due to medical error.
Bear in mind that’s 1100 (1118 actually) out of 136,000,000 patients.
The other 99.999992% of deaths in the ED were therefore due to the patients themselves and poor life choices and/or actuarial karma, and/or other people not in the medical field.
So your medical staff is only 125,000X less likely to kill you than anyone else you meet, including your bartender, or the guy who sells you steaks and butter.
If folks prefer, we could ban hospitals, and make ED visits 0 per year, to get rid of those 1118 medical staff-caused deaths, but that 300,000 overall deaths number would probably rise to about 20,000,000 or so deaths/year, with no medical people to blame for any of them at all.
Everybody in favor of that, raise your hand.
Within about 15 years, the death rate would drop too, but only when the US national population was down to around 20M, nationwide, about where it was in 1845.
Medicine as a profession isn’t the problem.
You pay your nickel, and you take your chances in life. Choose wisely.
Anne · March 2, 2024 at 2:56 pm
So Good
Aesop · March 3, 2024 at 1:43 pm
Great synopsis, DM.
Now do alcohol bottles. 😉
Then street pharmacology.
Don’t forget ladders.
Oh, and cars, with a motorcycle subset. (And maybe a helmet-lacking sub-subset).
Even as a trauma center, we see twice as many knife wounds that are self-inflicted (accidentally in the kitchen) every week than we do deliberate stabbings most weeks, since ever.
And purely anecdotally, gunshot wounds (GSWs) are a function of physics, i.e. the bullet will hit whoever had the misfortune of being in front of the gun, be they good, bad, or indifferent, for any range variable.
But of all the trauma stabbing victims I’ve met, which required someone else to actually be at bad breath range and want to stab you (IOW, no stabbings ever happened accidentally, in my experience), in 99% of cases, within 5 minutes of meeting the “victims”, I (and everyone else nearby) understood why they got stabbed, agreed with that course of action, and in 80% of those cases, hospital staff thought they hadn’t been stabbed enough, yet, and would have been happy to poke them a few more times, on general principles.
Comments are closed.