In Medical Triumph, Homicides Fall Despite Soaring Gun Violence

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6. O.K., no subscription wall for me, so here's a few points from the article:

The reported number of people treated for gunshot attacks from 2001 to 2011 has grown by nearly half.

No hard numbers given, so hard to judge what they mean by "nearly half". These kinds of reports are often noteable for the... ummm... "generosity"... in their rounding methods. No data, no good conclusions. They also do not put forth any of a number of other stats such as the actual per capita rates.... hmmmm.....

After a steady decline through the 1990s, the annual number of homicides zigzagged before resuming a decline in 2007, falling from 16,929 that year to an estimated 14,722 in 2010, according to FBI crime data.

At the same time, medical data and other surveys in the U.S. show a rising number of serious injuries from assaults with guns and knives. The estimated number of people wounded seriously enough by gunshots to require a hospital stay, rather than treatment and release, rose 47% to 30,759 in 2011 from 20,844 in 2001, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System-All Injury Program. The CDC estimates showed the number of people injured in serious stabbings rose to 23,550 from 22,047 over the same period.

And again no per capita rates....

"Our experience is we are saving many more people we didn't save even 10 years ago," said C. William Schwab, director of the Firearm and Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the professor of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

Driving the advances in treatment is a symbiotic relationship between trauma centers and military medicine. Military doctors honed the use of blood banks and helicopter transport during the Korean and Vietnam wars, said Thomas Scalea, Physician-in-Chief at the R Adams Cowley trauma center in Baltimore.

Civilian doctors made advances in the treatment of gunshot wounds during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when U.S. homicides peaked. They learned that patients were more likely to survive if doctors first stabilized them and then treated one injury at a time, Dr. Scalea said. That allowed the patient to recover between operations.

Methods were refined by the military over the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. War doctors learned how to better deal with blood loss, a major cause of death from such injuries.

This is really nothing new. Similar medical advancements occured during all wars in American history.

Mortality rates of gunshot victims, meanwhile, have fallen, according to research performed for The Wall Street Journal by the Howard-Hopkins Surgical Outcomes Research Center, a joint venture between Howard University and Johns Hopkins University. In 2010, 13.96% of U.S. shooting victims died, almost two percentage points lower than in 2007. (Earlier data used different standards, making comparisons useless.)

Interesting admission. Which makes it all the more difficult to draw any firm conclusions.

Good article, but about the only firm statement that can be made is that medical treatment is getting better.