Thoughts on the Boston Lockdown from the edge

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9 points·Anechoic··7 comments

> It’s true, we don’t make it an issue for every single person in a city every time three or four people are murdered.

I feel like I have to make this point in every thread about these, but it's not 3 or 4 deaths, it's 4 deaths and 150-odd injuries, among with a large percentage(edit:13 amputations per CNN, see child comment) losing limbs.

This is not 'Tuesday' in Detroit, and it's really frustrating that people can't seem to think that getting your legs blown off is not a big deal.

13 people had limbs amputated out of 183 hospitalizations, according to CNN.

Still, I think it's too easy to to write off injury statistics as probably not that bad. So, less than 1 in 10 people hospitalized ended up loosing a limb, but I know there was a lot of talk about shrapnel taking "chunks" out of people's legs. Many of the victims may suffer permanent disabilities. One guy lost an eye.

I used to assume that when I heard injury reports after an accident that I could safely round down to a smaller number of 'truly serious' injuries. But I haven't able to think about it the same way after reading an interview with a guy who does forensics in suicide bomber cases. He said something along the lines of "You hear '15 injured', and you think they probably needed stitches or something. But for most of them, 'injured' really means 'fucked for life'"

Those stats seem bad to me. I just wanted to throw out some actual reported numbers.

I couldn't find the stat which is why I didn't cite it. Thanks for finding it. It's still horrific in a way

Are those the amputations performed at the hospital? Or does that include the amputations caused by the bombs?

I'm not big on TL;DRs, but this post is screaming for one.

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