Praise for Mother Nature
What a fantastic article and photos (RC, “Lost and found,” Aug. 19)! I’ve been staring at the images and have read the article several times now. Kudos to both Rosette Royale and Bryant Carlin on a great piece of journalism. My hope is that Bryant comes back from his six months in Olympic National Park with more great images.
Corey Gault | Seattle
Bullet In The Brain
In 1977, when I was the chief resident on the Harborview Medical Center Neurosurgical service for six months, I took care of all of the patients with gunshot wounds to the head admitted during that half year — both of them.
One was a murderer shot fleeing the police, and the second was a suicide.
Now, one patient with a gunshot wound to the head is admitted each week. Data from the Medical Examiner’s Office suggest that currently there are not fewer than 151 gunshot wounds to the head in King County every year.
Nationally published data in 2014 revealed that nearly 25,000 people are shot in the brain annually, with a 91 percent mortality rate.
While the reasons for this massive increase are many, the glorification of violence, ready access to weapons and hopelessness are surely among them. I don’t have any better solutions to this awful situation than anyone else (and, believe me, taking care of young people shot in the brain is awful), but at some point our society will have to confront this horror and confront it directly without regard for the meaningless rhetoric politicians and others have designed to make it worse.
Should we glorify war? Should guns really be available to anyone? Isn’t it better, smarter and more humane to arrest hopelessness in grade school than to wait to arrest more people living on the street as adults?
Had these questions been put to the citizens of Seattle in 1977, the answers would have been seen both as obvious and nearly unanimous.
In 2015, we should be thinking about something other than ourselves now and then.
Richard Rapport, MD
Clinical Professor
Department of Neurological Surgery
and Department of Global Health
University of Washington School of Medicine