This morning when I was doing my first search through media for SR I came across this article, about teaching elementary school children how to to deal with gun wounds to stop someone from bleeding out. As I was reading the article I also saw on CNN a video on the same thing. I told my wife, a former elementary school teacher what I had seen and read. Her response, “You’re telling me we are now living in a war zone.” As I thought about what she had said I realized, yes we are in a war zone. Bullet wounds are the leading cause of death for children in the United States. Yet, despite that the christofascist cabal on the Supreme Court has just relegalized bump stocks, and we have more guns than people in the country. We also have a growing problem with White terrorism amongst the MAGAt population. So, I thought, that teaching little boys and girls how to take off a sock or their shirt and stuff it into a bullet wound, and press down to stop the bleeding, might actually save some lives given that there so many children are shot each year
In case of heavy bleeding, children are taught to use anything that’s available to pack a wound, even a “dirty, smelly sock. Credit: CNN
ROCKLIN, CALIFORNIA — When I visited Rocklin Elementary school, I sat in on a lesson with a third-grade class – a lesson I would never have imagined as a father, a journalist or a trauma surgeon.
“Chances are, you’re never ever going to have to use this. If you do, it’s gonna be scary,” Kate Carleton told the 20 or so 8- and 9-year-olds. “But because we’ve taught you what to do, it makes it a little less scary.”
She spent the next 30 minutes teaching them how to stop a wound from bleeding out. The lesson is appropriately titled “Stop the Bleed.”
Carleton is a trauma nurse at Sutter Roseville Medical Center, a level 2 trauma center in Rocklin, California, a northern suburb of Sacramento. At the beginning of her 17-year career, she saw a lot of car crashes, motorcycle accidents and falls. More recently, the number of gunshot wounds coming through her hospital has increased, most often from domestic […]
