Friday, May 30, 2008

The Problem of Violence is Cultural

The Problem of Violence is Cultural and Moral

And this article from the May 30, 2008 London Evening Standard really captures this well, describing how their equivalent of emergency rooms are being overwhelmed by stabbings:
One of Britain's leading trauma surgeons has told how one in three of his Accident & Emergency 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.
Of course, the rest of the article suffers from the usual delusion that education is going to solve the problem. It will not. There is a serious cultural and moral problem that has developed, and no amount of education is going to fix this.

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