Firearms

RiskManager · Oct 2, 2015

So ... Who gets to deal with treating injuries and all the fall-out from an accidental death? Especially one involving guns and/or innocent bystanders.
That's way beyond sentinel event. The paperwork, the memos, the meetings, oh my! I suspect that liability costs alone would discourage facility owners from allowing CC as a matter of written policy.

You have just described my life as the person who has to do the paperwork, memos and meetings on this sort of stuff! And yes, from a liability and insurance perspective, there are few benefits and many potential detriments to allowing CC on hospital property by patients, visitors or staff except for law enforcement purposes. If the hospital chooses to have security personnel armed with firearms, the Liability Insurance costs go up significantly and fewer insurance companies are willing to write that coverage at all.

jbrmdr · Oct 2, 2015

I have a concealed carry permit. I work at a school so there are no firearms allowed on the property. I do think someone in the school should be able to carry since we don't have a SRO all the time. An administrator or someone. We have door locks and video cameras and other security measures but if someone wants in they will find a way to get in.

futurenaijaRN, BSN, RN · Oct 2, 2015

Move away from the situation rather than hitting your patient.

meowmeowchirp, BSN · Oct 2, 2015

It is (I believe) in American's nature to slaughter each other on a regular basis. Well that's not right since we also slaughter people around the world pretty regularly, as evidenced most recently by hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed Iraqi women and children.
Its just what Americans do. The devices and tools used to do so will not make any difference IMO. Take away one and we simply move on to another.
I believe this is related to the highly religious nature of our country.

Hm. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective before but that makes a lot of sense.

Although I do still think that accessibility to guns still plays a large role, as again it's hard to mass murder with anything else. I had always considered your gun laws to be the only/main difference....but your religion compared to most other first world countries is definitely extreme (or so I believe, I have too much homework at the moment to add religious studies to the mix haha).

PMFB-RN, RN · Oct 3, 2015

Even if that is true (which I would dispute,

Certainly it's up for dispute. I have no evidence at all and was only expressing my opinion base on my own observation

since the vast majority of us go our entire lives without "slaughtering" another individual (on an individual basis, that is, and the support for our various military adventures around the world is certainly not unanimous),

Of course the vast majority never will kill anyone. However I don't think anyone will disagree, and there is significant evidence to show, that Americans kill each other at a higher rate than the people in other first world countries. This is true for both firearms related killing and for other devices as well. While support for our killing abroad is by no means unanimous, if I remember right, 4 out of 5 Americans supported Bush's choice to invade and occupy Iraq. Opposition to Bush's invasion among the people of other first world nations was near universal. To me this really says something is different about Americans. Maybe because I have spend years living and working in other countries, and beacuse my wife is not an American and I often hear her perspective, it's more obvious to me.

how can you say with a straight face that "the devices and tools used to do so will not make any difference IMO. Take away one and we simply move on to another."

As stated, that is only my opinion. As an amature student of history I am aware of a vast number of cases where very large numbers of people were effeciently slaughtered without firearms. For example Hernan Cortez (an extremely devout and pious Catholic) and a small group of spaniards managed to slaughter tens of thousands of native Americans in a short time without firearms in the early 1500's. The examples are endless.

As the old cliche' goes, how many people get killed each year in drive-by stabbings? (How many innocent bystanders get caught in the "cross-stabbing"?)

Of course we have no way of knowing since Americans have relativly easy access to firearms. I believe the number killed in stabbings (or bombing, or bludgenoing, or garroted, etc instead) would be similar as the desire to kill others would still remain in an unusually large number of Americans, or so I believe.

How many people would be killed if a disgruntled individual walked into a full movie theatre and started throwing rocks (or attempting to knock people over the head with rocks)?

My guess would be fewer than if he had a firearm, and many less if he used a bomb instead.

PMFB-RN, RN · Oct 3, 2015

Hm. I hadn't thought about it from that perspective before but that makes a lot of sense.
Although I do still think that accessibility to guns still plays a large role, as again it's hard to mass murder with anything else. I had always considered your gun laws to be the only/main difference....but your religion compared to most other first world countries is definitely extreme (or so I believe, I have too much homework at the moment to add religious studies to the mix haha).

There is some evidence to support the notion that more religion = more murder, It's talked about in this article:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/our-humanity-naturally/201103/misinformation-and-facts-about-secularism-and-religion

A quote from the link:

Citing four different studies, Zuckerman states: "Murder rates are actually lower in more secular nations and higher in more religious nations where belief in God is widespread." He also states: "Of the top 50 safest cities in the world, nearly all are in relatively non-religious countries."
Within the United States, we see the same pattern. Citing census data, he writes: "And within America, the states with the highest murder rates tend to be the highly religious, such as Louisiana and Alabama, but the states with the lowest murder rates tend to be the among the least religious in the country, such as Vermont and Oregon."

PMFB-RN, RN · Oct 3, 2015

PMFB-RN, your point is also a perfect example of the difference between a controlled setting like a firing range and a rapidly-evolving crisis in, say, a hospital. In a word: adrenalin.

While certainly true, reaction while under extreme stress is something that can be controlled by training. As a former member of a highly trained army unit we often faced situation of extreme stress where the adrenalin was flowing like a river, and yet our soldiers remained under control, managed to hit what they were shooting at (mostly) and maintain fire disipline.

Farawyn · Oct 3, 2015

While certainly true, reaction while under extreme stress is something that can be controlled by training. As a former member of a highly trained army unit we often faced situation of extreme stress where the adrenalin was flowing like a river, and yet our soldiers remained under control, managed to hit what they were shooting at (mostly) and maintain fire disipline.

How MUCH training? And still, human behavior under stress with a gun is not something I'm willing to bet on.

PMFB-RN, RN · Oct 3, 2015

How MUCH training?

I was attempting to point out the difference between the training recieved by certain military units vs typical police and using my own experience as an example.

And still, human behavior under stress with a gun is not something I'm willing to bet on.

While that will alwasy be a variable, you don't really have much choice. It's not like we can do away with the 300,000,000 + firearms currently available in this country and nobody has yet proposed any legislation that would do anything to change that.

Mavrick, BSN, RN · Oct 3, 2015

While that will always be a variable, you don't really have much choice. It's not like we can do away with the 300,000,000 + firearms currently available in this country and nobody has yet proposed any legislation that would do anything to change that.

Yup, can't put all those cats back in the bag.

Maybe we could start working on our attitude about firearms. It worked for cigarettes. Showing disfigured people graphically on TV took a little of the sparkle off that shiny pack 'o cigs.

bloatedputti, MSN, RN · Oct 3, 2015

Luckily most maniacs understand that a hospital has pure intentions, non political or religious. i am all for metal detectors and guards, not guns.

azhiker96, BSN, RN · Oct 3, 2015

True. People get killed in all sorts of creative ways. But the numbers matter -- maybe not to the deceased, but certainly to the rest of us. What do the FBI data show about the number of people killed with guns vs. other types of weapons. And how many people were killed last year in mass stabbings? Mass poisonings? Mass clubbings?

It's easy enough to check the FBI website for the data. You can find it for a number of years and porificed by state as well.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8

Just a few numbers from 2010 for murders by:

Guns - 8,874

Handguns - 6115

Rifles - 367

Knives - 1732

Clubs, hammers, etc - 549

Hands/feet - 769

A focus of the gun control goups has been rifles, specifically rifles that look like military weapons.

Year after year murders by hands/feet, clubs/hammers, and knives greatly exceed those by rifles of which only a portion are evil black rifles.