My wife has been in the business for less time and HAS treated bad guys who got shot by good guys in self defense.
The truth is that Emergency Physicians most of the time don't know the circumstances of how and why someone got hurt (stabbed/shot) as it is a potential criminal matter. Physicians just treat the patient. So the author is actually lying when he states:
The truth is he doesn't know. Lawful self defense is for the authorities to decide... usually well after the fact.in all those years of emergency medicine, I never treated a single patient who was shot by a law-abiding citizen in self-protection. Not one.
Sainsbury lied AGAIN when he wrote:
This is what Kleck actually said:Kleck also suggests that hundreds of thousands of criminals are shot annually by law-abiding citizens.
In a second variety of this fallacious line of reasoning,
Hemenway cited estimates of the number of gunshot wound
(GSW) victims treated in emergency rooms and falsely claimed
that “K-G report that 207,000 times per year the gun defender
thought he wounded or killed the offender” (1997b, p. 1442). In
fact, Kleck and Gertz did not compute or report this 207,000
estimate. Quite the contrary––they specifically cautioned against
using NSDS data to generate such an estimate
Kleck Degrading Scientific StandardsCook and Ludwig claimed to have established inconsistencies
between their results and other statistics, concluding that their
large DGU results were therefore implausible. In all cases, their
reasoning was fallacious. For example, they cited data on the
number of people treated in emergency rooms for nonfatal
gunshot wounds and asserted that their own survey’s estimates
of criminals wounded during DGUs were implausibly high in
comparison. In fact, the two sets of numbers are perfectly
consistent once one acknowledges that criminals wounded by
victims are unlikely to seek medical treatment, since medical
personnel are required to report gunshot wounds to police, and
most such wounds are survivable without professional medical
treatment (Kleck 1997, Chapter 1). Cook and Ludwig dealt with
the possibility that most criminals wounded by gun-wielding
victims do not receive emergency room treatment by simply
announcing that “we find that possibility rather unlikely” (1996).
They did not even bother to provide their readers with a rationale
for this arbitrary pronouncement, never mind any supporting
evidence.
Their assessment might have been based on either of two
unsupported premises: (1) a typical GSW is so serious that people
suffering such a wound could not substitute self-treatment for
professional treatment without placing their lives in peril, or (2)
criminals are ignorant of, or indifferent to, the fact that medical
personnel treating their wounds would report GSW patients to the
police. Unless one accepts these dubious premises, it hard to see
how one could reasonably assume that all, nearly all, or even
most criminals wounded during DGUs would seek treatment at
an emergency room.
Next most of the time self defense does not involve shooting.
Lastly there are more animal attacks than criminal attacks... and emergency physicians treat people, and are not veterinarians.
I think Sainsbury should get back to hospice and geriatric care... Perhaps he's better at that.