There have been a number of mass shootings in the country recently. The elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, became one of the deadliest school shootings in US history, sparking calls for stricter gun control measures across the country.
The 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was one of the high-profile mass shootings in recent U.S. history.
The number of bullets a magazine typically carries is one of the factors that determines the caliber of a rifle. The term semiautomatic means that the shooter needs to pull thetrigger to fire each shot, as opposed to an automatic weapon, which continues to fire for as long as the shooter holds down thetrigger. The Firearm Owners' Protection Act of 1986 restricted fully automatic weapons for civilians.
Many parts of the country have easy access to the AR-15-style rifles. The purpose of the gun is to shoot a lot of high- caliber bullets very quickly and do a lot of damage.
According to Dr. Naik-Mathuria, injuries from this type of weapon are almost unsurvivable because of the damage they cause to the victims.
Naik-Mathuria said that some of her colleagues treated patients of the Uvalde school shooting, but that few of the victims survived. She said that they received very few patients because of what happened with assault weapons.
She said that the blast effect, or the cavitation effect, that a handgun shot causes is not as destructive to internal organs as a high-velocity weapon. You can usually see a hole on the outside of a handgun and a bigger hole on a shotgun. She said that a bullet from an assault weapon can cause bleeding from vessels and destroy soft tissue, as well as organs.
They can't handle organs that aren't very elastic. Naik-Mathuria said that they would break.
She said that the reason the AR-15 is so deadly is that victims are hit by more than one bullet.
Gun violence is the leading cause of death in children between the ages of 1 and 19 in the US according to a recent New England Journal of Medicine report.
Naik-Mathuria says that it's difficult to save someone from an injury from an assault rifle, but it's difficult for children. She says that children don't have as much blood in their bodies as adults because they lose a lot of blood very quickly.
Children have less blood volume than adults do. You can imagine how fast the amount of blood that they lose is compared to an adult.
The location of the wounds can affect the chances of survival. There is a higher chance of survival if the bullets hit the limbs. She says blood loss from these injuries could be enough to kill them.
There is a challenge in the race to save children from injuries from rifles. It has to be a group of people who see them. They have to be in a trauma center, a Level I trauma center, where there's massive amounts of blood available and all the equipment that you need, and many surgeons and different techniques to use.
She said that the US has less than 50 trauma centers for children. The time it takes to get victims to the hospital can make a difference.
It's very complicated and I wish we could just wave a magic wand and fix those injuries. In order to save them, they have to be in the right place at the right time.
The road to recovery for those who survive injuries is long, and many survivors spend months in intensive care.
A child with a gun injury was in the hospital for 7 months. Imagine something five times the size.
The patients and their families have to deal with psychological trauma too. When gunshot victims leave the intensive care unit, many hospitals have crisis counselors and social workers on hand to help.
Naik-Mathuria is one of the doctors taking part in a social media movement that uses the #ThisIsOurLane to demand action to reduce gun violence. After a number of reports on gun violence were published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, the National Rifle Association responded with a message that read, " Someone should tell self- important anti-gun doctors to stay in their lane." Policies to reduce the rate of firearm injuries and deaths were the majority of the articles.
The social media campaign was created in the wake of two mass shootings: one at a California bar that ended in 12 deaths and the other at a Pittsburgh synagogue. There was a mass shooting at a school in Uvalde.
These patients are taken care of by us. We keep an eye on them. We have a good relationship with them. Naik-Mathuria said that doctors feel responsible for the patients. Gun violence is a public health problem that needs to be fixed immediately.
There is no place for assault-style weapons. She said that she believes that most people in her society and most surgeons believe that.
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