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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, one of the reasons that trauma surgeons from chicago and baltimore have a really pristine reputation is that they get a lot of practice.

I remember hearing about programs like this perhaps 15 years ago, so I'm not surprised they're ongoing.

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As was Northern Ireland during the troubles and they still deal today with a fair number of Kneecappings or 50/50's

I hadn't heard 50/50 in that context before, it is a gunshot to the spine?

Apparently so 50% chance of walking after

I think its because there's a 100% chance of having the lower 50% of the body paralyzed [1].

[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/killing-may-end-the-blind-ey...

A lot of practice, it seems. Chicago has one shooting every 4 hours and one murder every 17 hours.

Gun control didn't help that much after all

America in general. A surgeon in the Netherlands can wait DECADES for a kid with gunshot wounds. Its just textbook stuff but if you want to see it in action the US is a good place to learn.

> America in general

"America in stereotype" is more accurate.

Your Netherlands comment is also hyperbole. Here's an article about a kid who was shot and killed on an Amsterdam playground a few weeks ago. Two other people were wounded by what in America would be called an "active shooter." But that only happens in America, right?

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/910572/Amsterdam-shooti...

He's a troll. Read through his comment history, it's nothing but "love socialism; hate capitalism" rhetoric.

Anecdote aside, it's established beyond a doubt that the US has much, much higher rates of gun violence than European countries, across every dimension: wounds, deaths, assault, self-harm, accidents... You name it, there's a statistic documenting it.

For example, according to healthdata.org, in 2016, physical violence by firearm was the cause of 210.5 DALYs per 100,000. In the Netherlands it was 10.8.

A DALY is a standardized metric defined by the WHO as "lost years of life" to measure the burden of a disease or other affliction.

So in 2016 physical violence by firearm caused 20 times more harm per capita to the US population than to the Dutch population. I'm willing to bet that for self-harm and accidental firearm wounds the gap is even larger, given the idiotic habit Americans have of keeping guns and ammunition stored in their homes.

Source: https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/

I'm not disputing that America has far more gun deaths than most (all?) other nations, but to generalize that the violence in Chicago is endemic to the rest of the nation is pure fantasy.

There are tens of thousands of towns, villages, and cities that see little to no gun violence each year. But they don't get written up in the Daily Fail.

There are ~19,000 incorporated places (cities, towns and villages) in the United States so to say 'tens of thousands' of them see little to no gun violence would be a significant overstatement.

If you limit yourself to incorporated places. There are a lot more places in America that aren't incorporated.

And just because a town isn't incorporated doesn't mean it's small. Pahrump, Nevada, for example, is 40,000 people and it's not incorporated.

> to generalize that the violence in Chicago is endemic to the rest of the nation is pure fantasy.

That wasn't the comment.

The comment was that most surgeons in the Netherlands can wait decades before seeing a gunshot wound. If they want hands-on experience, the US is a good place to learn. I think that's a very reasonable comment (EDIT maybe "years" is more reasonable than "decades"...) and if you account for accidents and self-harm, you really don't need to go to Chicago or Baltimore. The vast majority of gun wounds in the US are accidents or self-harm and occur all over the US, including "quiet little towns". I would argue that the real fantasy is to think that the gun violence epidemic is limited to big cities with black guys in hoodies shooting at each other.

It's more common than people like to acknowledge.

The violent crime rate in Chicago is lower than ~30 other US cities. It sits about even with Tulsa.

The thing that makes Chicago stand out is that its population transforms the rate into a larger raw number.

It's really crazy when you look at just how many murders / deaths we have compared to anyone else.

I decided to check the right-wing conspiracy theory that if you dropped the top four Democratic controlled cities from the US numbers, we'd be in the range of other 1st world democracies. No idea which cities those are supposed to be, but I assume Chicago and NY and LA and St Louis.

Spoiler alert, we're not. Even throwing out all gunshot murders from IL, CA, NY, LA, MO (New Orleans), while keeping the population, still doesn't get us below 2x rate of CAN. You have to toss TX, NJ, MT, OK, to get in the ballpark.

Eh? Canada has a lower rate of gun deaths than ANY US state; 1.97 vs 2.78 in Hawaii, the lowest. Canada’s rate is still high for a developed country, incidentally.

Edit: sorry, missed you were talking about murders; I was using data for all deaths.

The US has 10.5 gun deaths per 100k per year; the Netherlands has 0.58. The lowest US state is Hawaii, with 2.71. Hawaii is higher than almost anywhere in Western Europe; only Finland, France and Switzerland are higher.

Obviously not everywhere in the US has the same rate of gun deaths, but compared to The Netherlands anywhere is high.

I take your point. But its also true that if you measure violent death over the last 100 years Europe is way, way, way ahead. Around 90 million Europeans have died violently over the last century -- guns, bombs, gas, starvation -- at the hands of its governments and people.

The US would have to have a Parkland style school shooting every hours on the hours for the next 600 years to catch up.

I'm don't think that including a world war is a reasonable comparison.

Today, or even in the last decade, the risk of gun violence is far, far greater in the US is far greater than Europe.

We could discuss violent deaths over the last 100 years... But that would be incredibly off topic given that we're discussing how surgeons in different countries have different exposure to gun trauma today...

How many gunshot murders are there per year in the NL? How many emergency surgeons are there?

You posted a ton of nationalistic swipes to HN after we asked you not to. That counts as arson here. It reliably leads to flamewars. We've banned the account.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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