Thursday, January 12, 2017

It Was Bloody Chaos

It sounded much worse than it actually was, or at least must have seemed so since our future nurse came running down-stairs to see what the medical emergency was all about.

I was clearing the table after dinner and felt a tickle in my nose. I wiped it with a napkin and this quickly stimulated a bright red drop of blood to fall neatly to the floor. This was instantly noticed by our dog, who is accustomed to swooping in and devouring anything she sees falling to the floor. Mid pounce, I commanded her "un uha"! and that paused her for the moment. Then I squatted down to wipe up the blood spot. Henceforth, the blood started dripping at about one drop every 3 seconds. I was behind the curve--I could not get the floor clean before the next drop fell and I did not want our spaniel getting a taste for Human blood.

So I called out to my wife, in the adjacent kitchen, to bring me a paper towel. She showed up at the same time as the future RN who countermanded my wife's advice to tilt my head back. Her training was that one could choke or become sick from ingesting blood, though it seemed too little to cause any such harm. I did follow her advice, to be supportive and really the crisis was past, now that I could hold my nose with one towel and wipe the floor with the other.

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Massachusetts Lowest "Gun Death" Rate

Our local NPR station reported this morning that we have the lowest gun death rate in the nation. Yeah!

Does that mean we have the lowest murder rate? Um, no. We are 6th best as of 2015 (latest data I could find) Here 1.9 murders/year/100,000 people.

That leaves suicide and accidents. Well, the suicide rate in MA is 8.3 suicides/year/100,000 people and while it is 4 times the murder rate, it is nonetheless the lowest in the nation, please see here.

They could have been more honest and simply said that Massachusetts has a lowish murder rate but mostly a very low suicide rate. I think that most people care more about murder and suicide than about how these acts are performed, so the obfuscation of "gun deaths" distracts from the real story.