Surgeon: One in Three of Trauma Patients Has Been Knifed
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Justin Davenport and Anna Davis, This Is London, June 2, 2008
Knife violence in London is now running as high as gun warfare in some US cities, it is claimed today.
One of Britain’s leading trauma surgeons has told how one in three of his trauma patients is now a stabbing victim.
Karim Brohi, a consultant surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, said the proportion of injuries from knives and guns was now on a level with—if not greater than—cities such as Los Angeles or Chicago.
He described how, on occasions, the wards in his hospital resembled “a war zone” with some patients being treated for their second or third knife wound.
And—in a letter to the Evening Standard—Mr Brohi, along with two senior trauma medics, called for more prevention strategies to solve the underlying causes of knife crime.
He said there was a real “potential” for surgeons and doctors to help in the fight against crime through a variety of schemes—such as doctors visiting schools to talk about knife injuries.
Mr Brohi spoke out as an Evening Standard survey showed how casualty wards across the capital were bearing the brunt of the rise in knife crime and treating hundreds of victims each year.
A snapshot survey of wards reveals at least 424 knife victims have been treated in hospital for stab wounds so far this year, 227 of which were serious cases. The true number of victims is even higher because each hospital records cases of stabbings in different ways.
Some major trauma hospitals, such as the Royal London, show significant increases in the number of people being treated for major stab wounds.
Surgeons there have dealt with 100 major stabbings so far this year, compared to 77 in the same period last year.
Mr Brohi, one of the country’s experts in dealing with knife and gunshot injuries, said the number of people being treated for knife injuries was rising almost “month on month”.
His letter to the Standard was written along with two leading members of London’s medical profession, the Royal London’s surgical registrar Thomas Konig and Dr Anne Weaver, the lead clinician for the capital’s air ambulance service.
The medics say: “We have already seen 100 major stabbings at The Royal London Hospital alone this year. This figure does not include minor cuts and lacerations that are not life threatening and are seen on a daily basis. In 2007 we saw 71 patients in the same period and 185 patients in the whole year.
“The Helicopter Emergency Medical Service provides London-wide pre-hospital care and patients are treated at various hospitals across London and they see about 30 per cent of the major stabbings that occur.
“So far this year they have attended 121 patients with a stabbing injury, 19 of whom have died on the scene. They have performed open heart surgery on 10 patients on the streets of London this year alone.
“The number of stabbings in London is unfortunately beginning to match some inner city areas of the United States.
“The dramatic rise in serious injury from people carrying knives is undoubtedly having an impact on the hospitals treating these injuries. “
The trauma experts say that underlying-social issues are behind knife crime and more needs to be done to develop prevention strategies alongside specialist trauma care. The letter states: “There is potential to reduce crime from our side if we could understand behaviour and liaise with victims and potential perpetrators. With a system that encompasses both treatment and injury prevention tactics we may go some way to improving outcome and decrease the level of violence that we are currently seeing across our city.”
Mr Brohi said one option could involve reformed gang members talking to stab victims in hospital in an effort to get them to mend their ways. He also gave details of how the rate of stabbings in the capital is matching American rates. At the Royal London last year about 23 per cent of its trauma workload involved penetrating wounds—stab or gunshot wounds—but last month this figure had risen to 30 per cent.
In the United States, surgeons at hospitals in cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit and Chicago treated an average of between 25 to 30 per cent of penetrative injuries. Only in some inner city boroughs such as Brooklyn in New York was the rate higher.
Mr Brohi pointed out that in the States the majority of the wounds were caused by gunshots, while in Britain the majority were knife injuries.
He described how surgeons often felt helpless in trying to deal with the underlying problems of knife culture.
He said: “When you get as many young people in who have been stabbed, walking around the wards sometimes feels almost like being in a war zone.
“It feels unpleasant, it is fairly depressing. Some are gang members, some are innocent victims, some are not in gangs but resort to knife crime to resolve really small disputes. The ages are getting younger.”
He went on: “We are a lot more than just surgeons. We have rehabilitation roles too. If you are involved in treating Aids or TB then you have a moral duty to be involved in preventing these diseases as well as treating them.
“It is our duty as health care workers to reduce the problem that is out there. That may mean working in schools helping educate kids about the consequences of their actions or it might involve bringing ex-gang members into hospitals to talk to people who are victims of violence.
“We have people coming in who are on their second or third stabbing and of course they may be likely to go out and stab someone.
“Somehow you have to break this cycle of young people feeling the need to carry a knife. We have tried to engage with community leaders but there is very little funding to employ people to do this.”
(Posted on June 2, 2008)
Comments
When Britain was all white the police didn’t even carry guns. Now that London has a large number of minorities, it’s crime rate is approacing that of America’s inner cities.
Posted by Nordic at 6:04 PM on June 2
“Mr Brohi said one option could involve reformed gang members talking to stab victims in hospital in an effort to get them to mend their ways.”
The denial of racial differences in crime and violent behavior is now getting to the point of being absolutely absurd. The above “option” would be like having a dunce talk with smart people and expecting them to then smarten up.
Posted by Robert at 8:03 PM on June 2
This is somewhat of a diversion. Since the labor government made the private possession of just about any firearm illegal for the British, the number of gun related crimes has skyrocketed. According to a recent BBC documentary, it remains extremely easy to obtain firearms among the criminal classes. This is nothing but one more massive failure of gun control. The fact that there are also a significant amount of knife violence does not bear on the availability of guns. It merely demonstrates a dramatic rise in violent crime of all varieties in “gun free” Britain.
Could this possibly have anything to do with the massive third world immigration which the nation has experienced since the end of WWII when a conservative PM opened the gates to unlimited former-colonial immigration? Enoch Powell was very prophetic in his Rivers of Blood speech. The amount of violent criminal behavior is largely a function of the numbers of violent criminals in a society. Thanks to both the Tories and Labor, Britain is now brimming over with such elements, largely as a direct result of non-white immigration. What can we expect now—banning the ownership of knives? This will work just as well as the gun ban. What the British clearly need to do is ban the sources of violent criminal behavior, i.e. adopt a rational immigration and repatriation policy which results in a Britain made up of British peoples. Until and unless they do that, there will be no end of the continual increase in violent crime in their society. Just watch.
Posted by at 9:36 PM on June 2
Robert Knox, the young man who played as Marcus Belby in the Harry Potter movies was stabbed to death in London a few weeks ago.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 9:41 PM on June 2
I strongly object to using the term gun violence. It creates false presumption that guns are bad and give rise to violence. Would you call an act of intentionally killing someone with motor vehicle a car violence, or breaking someone’s skull with a 500-year old heavy Bible a Bible violence?
Posted by A Reader at 11:06 PM on June 2
““The number of stabbings in London is unfortunately beginning to match some inner city areas of the United States”
That’s what the anti-gun crowd here in the US don’t get. It’s not the guns that are the problem, it’s the people who use them and certain “ethnic” groups use them a whole lot more. Take away all guns in the US, and they’d just be stabbing each other, same killings, just a different method. Of course these thugs get the guns illegally so barring them wouldn’t make a difference to these thugs.
Posted by kc at 7:18 AM on June 3
Despite all the spin and propaganda you might here, London is a terrible place in which to live - and will only get worse in the future.
Posted by Kenelm Digby at 8:06 AM on June 3
Of the 42 teenagers murdered in London since the start of last year, not a single one of the perpetrators were white, except for a Turkish man, who could possibly be called white.
London doesn’t have a gun or knife problem, it has a black gun and knife problem.
Posted by watfordman at 11:21 AM on June 3
we must ban knives! except for the daggers the Sikhs carry— that would be racist.
Posted by feanor at 11:31 AM on June 3
When Britain was all white the police didn’t even carry guns. Now that London has a large number of minorities, its crime rate is approaching that of America’s inner cities.
Posted by Nordic at 6:04 PM on June 2
It’s true. But there is much more to it.
One of the cornerstone assumption of the “Liberal” ideology is an absurd doctrine “educate not incarcerate”. In particular, the “Liberals” are staunchly opposed to elimination criminals from the society. Although they, usually, won’t say that openly, they give us enough hints what they are up to.
Here are few examples.
“Criminals [crime] will always be with us” [L.A. police chief Burton, meaning that we have to accept the criminals among us].
“Show me a 10 ft fence and I will show you an 11 ft ladder” [AZ governor Napolitano, meaning that the invaders will always persist and, eventually, find their way through the border, no matter how fortified it is].
“They paid their debt to the society” [each and every “Liberal” lawyer about ex-cons, meaning that those who served their time in jail become as desirable members of the society as anybody else is].
And the list goes on and on and on.
With this kind of approach to the problem, there is absolutely no good reason for a crime to vanish, except, perhaps, when the criminals see how wrong they were, denounce their criminal “lifestyles”, and start being law abiding citizens from now on. (I don’t bet on it.)
How utterly absurd the “Liberal” theory about crime and other asocial behavior is one can see comparing any contemporary Western country to, say, Sweden some 100 years ago. Crime there virtually did not exist, not because the Swedes decided that they will no longer engage in stealing and raping, but because of harsh punishment of the criminals that drastically reduced criminals’ chances of reproduction.
In other words, Swedes made crime a maladaptive behavior in certain point of their history, and it worked. As opposed to it, the “Liberals” make sure that crime is not maladaptive, or even (mildly) adaptive (because one needs to fight “racism” in that latter case). As a result, the percentage of population with genetic inclination to lawbreaking and other asocial behavior slowly but steadily increases. And, of course, importing millions of individuals who genetically are not predisposed to follow the rules of the country that hosts them doesn’t make things any better, particularly when the “Liberals” obstruct elimination of criminals from the society.
There are some small steps in the right direction, like California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law, but ACLU and “Liberal” judges are making whatever they can to circumvent them. And when it comes to border and immigration law violators, there is no meaningful elimination (except, perhaps, accidental deaths) whatsoever. Gov. Napolitano’s quote (above) characterizes fairly well the sorry state of affairs in this matter.
In the past, when country A sent their invaders to country B, country B exercised its ultimate form of sovereignty and shot and killed the invaders. If the defenders persisted with their effort, shortly after that there were simply not enough invaders left to pose a credible threat to country B.
Unfortunately, this time-proven defense strategy seems no longer an option, with all that childish insistence on using “non-lethal weapons” etc. against the invaders, or just surrendering to them up front. An absurd situation that is a logical consequence of absurdity of the “Liberal” ideology.
This is why I wrote a while ago, half-jokingly, “deport all the ‘Liberals’ first”, but those of you who consider yourself “Liberals” seemed to object to that idea.
Posted by A Reader at 11:35 AM on June 3
Recently there was an article about weapons tech and put forward the idea that unless your race had developed this tech, you were predisposed to abuse that tech. This article destroys that idea. It seems that Africans are a violent race even if the tools of violence are no more advanced that the thighbone of an ox.
Posted by Gun Runner at 12:40 PM on June 3
Not sure about you, friends. Me, I always break up laughing whenever someone makes the claim: “Blacks, as a race, are no more crime-prone than any other racial group.” Pity the brains of British government leaders are so hopelessly scrambled. But then again, maybe mental incompetence is a requisite for getting into government?
Posted by Fed Up at 1:41 PM on June 3
“Mr Brohi said one option could involve reformed gang members talking to stab victims in hospital in an effort to get them to mend their ways.”
My college teacher told us that this type of thing, like, getting a former alcoholic to talk to those with a drinking problem, can sometimes backfire. The young student see’s the perfectly fine, even ‘expert’ mentor, and thinks to themself, ‘he’s perfectly fine, nothing happened to him’. My teacher was from Zimbwabwa.
Posted by at 3:37 PM on June 3
Curiously absent is an examination of who is doing all the stabbings.
They ain’t white….despite all the media attention to “hooliganism”.
Posted by at 4:19 PM on June 3
I have long held that they reason for high American crime was the clash of cultures and even more so - races. The idea of the melting pot was and is a bad one. It really only meant to apply to different European groups anyway, like Germans, English and French who had histories of wars in Europe. Of course, humans always take everything to the extreme. Insisting on this has been the cause of all the brutal criminal murders that have racked America for many decades. Yet, our government and now nearly every Western nation is committed to this idea, now called Diversity and Multiculturalism no matter how bloody it becomes.
Posted by Whiteplight at 4:49 PM on June 3
To the anonymous poster at 9:36pm on June 2
May I gently correct you. The decision to allow mass immigration to the UK after WW2 was made under the watch of Foreign Minister Ernest Bevan. It was the Nationality Act of 1948 and became law under a LABOUR Prime Minister, Clement Attlee!
Still, you are correct about the prophetic nature of Enoch Powell’s 1968 so-called “rivers of blood” speech. Powell’s only mistake (although it was a considerable one) was to underestimate the threat from mass Asian (and especially Muslim) immigration.
Posted by Johnny English at 7:15 PM on June 3
Petrified schoolboy, 14, ‘ran pleading for help before gang stabbed him to death’
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 2:20 PM on 02nd June 2008
A terrified 14-year-old killed in a knife attack begged a bystander for help as he fled from a mob of teenagers, the Old Bailey heard today.
Witness Tom Morgan told the court how stab victim Martin Dinnegan ran past him pleading: ‘Please help me.’
Mr Morgan said he saw the petrified boy hold his hands out in an attempt to placate one of his pursuers but Martin was felled by a punch to the head.
His attacker then pinned him to the ground and made repeated stabbing motions towards his back, the court heard.
Continues Here:
Posted by at 9:03 PM on June 3
Murder rate averages:
White Americans-5 per 100,000
White Canadians-3 per 100,000
White Britons- 5 per 100,000
White Western Europeans-2 per 100,000
White Australians-3 per 100,000
If you look at these statistics, whites regardless of how lenient or strict their country’s gun laws are, have murder rates about the same. This is something the US media NEVER mentions nor do medias in other countries. Gun laws in the US aren’t the problem, blacks are.
Posted by jo at 8:19 AM on June 4
Britain never would have had this problem if there weren’t so many Africans, Asians, and Middle Easterners now calling themselves British.
Posted by at 6:57 AM on June 5
“If you look at these statistics, whites regardless of how lenient or strict their country’s gun laws are, have murder rates about the same.”
That’s not entirely true. According to the statistics you present, when whites are exposed to ‘multiculuralism’ and it’s insanity, the murder rate nearly doubles. I imagine the Asian murder rate goes up as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if the murder rate of other non-whites stays about the same living with ‘multiculturalism’ as it does in their native countries, or even goes down.
Posted by at 3:05 PM on June 5
“Karim Brohi, a consultant surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, said the proportion of injuries from knives and guns was now on a level with—if not greater than—cities such as Los Angeles or Chicago”….
Yes, wherever you get a ‘poverty-stricken, alienated’, illiterate underclass with a tribal culture you get the said problems.
The only trouble is that Britain imported its problems against the wishes of majority of the electorate.
Sadly, I cannot see a way out of this. Nor does the received wisdom of senior politicians fill me with confidence.
(sings)
“Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London, stab vests are handy when attacked from behind [sic].” Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia watch, listen and learn.
Posted by Graham of Wales at 5:58 AM on June 7
“Mr Brohi said one option could involve reformed gang members talking to stab victims in hospital in an effort to get them to mend their ways.”
What does this mean????? That its the stabbing victims fault that they got stabbed?
Posted by at 3:39 PM on June 11
Guns themselves do not cause violence. Even if guns were completely banned 60 years ago in America, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, still would have happened. Regardless of whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, or James Earl Ray, acted alone, or were part of a conspiracy.
What the anti-gun, liberal media does not tell the public is not only do gun crimes happen in Great Britain, where fireams are banned, but that there is far less crime in Switzerland where gun ownership is mandatory.
In the USA, convicted felons, persons dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Armed Forces, persons declared legally insane and/or involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital, and persons who have renounced their U.S. citizenship; are all banned by law from owning or using any kind of firearm. Does this stop such people from obtaining firearms? Of course not. Just as in Great Britain where guns are completely banned, in the USA, such firearms-prohibited people have the criminal connections to buy guns illegally.
All that gun control does is disarm law-abiding citizens from being able to defend themselves.
There a is movie that I recommend to everyone reading this post, to rent on DVD, if you have not seen it already. This movie is “Taxi Driver” starring Robert Di Niro and Jodie Foster. One of most socially accurate parts of the movie is where Robert Di Niro’s character, Travis, is illegally buying guns from a black-market dealer in New York City, that has very strict guns laws.
The anti-gun people are sincere idiots who think they are doing the right thing. But their goal, the banning and confication of all fireams, to all people, will only cause crime to skyrocket and be a disaster for America, just as was alcohol prohibtion.
Two of history’s most horrendous dictatorships, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had gun control, under the guise of controlling crime.
Believe me all of you hunters reading this post, the anti-gun also want to confiscate your rifles and shotguns, not just handguns and assault weapons!
What is Great Britain going to do next, ban the possession of all knives?!
Posted by Ross at 7:43 AM on June 14