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The Right to Life Versus
The Right to
Bear Arms

Peter Houlahan for Hearst Newspaper Group

On December 14, 2012, I was the lead EMS crew member on third ambulance to arrive on-scene at Sandy Hook Elementary School.  We did not treat or transport a single patient.

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If you are not in the field of emergency medicine, you might not immediately appreciate the implications of that statement or its direct relevance to the national debate over regulation of the type of weapons used to carry out the mass murder of twenty first graders and six educators that day.

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Central to the debate on gun regulation – both legally and in the arena of public opinion – will be the right of governments to protect the safety of its citizens versus the constitutional right of those citizens to bear arms.  Consequently, future regulation of semiautomatic assault rifles and high capacity ammunition magazines will hinge in large part on the level of danger these weapons pose to public safety.

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Not surprisingly, efforts to downplay the lethality of these weapons by opponents of gun regulation have begun in earnest.  

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Gun manufacturers who were just months ago labeling these weapons with model names such as “Adaptive Combat Rifle” and marketing them as “the ultimate military combat weapons system” now find themselves in the curious position of claiming these same weapons are, to quote the NRA website, “…not more dangerous than any other standard firearms.” 

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The experience of emergency medical first responders at Sandy Hook shows otherwise.

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We are all familiar with the astonishingly high fatality rate of the shooting victims at Sandy Hook: Twenty six killed and only two survivors.  You might expect that ratio from a commercial airliner crash or skyscraper collapse, but this was the result of a single firearm in the hands of a mentally ill twenty year old with no formal weapons training.

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But even that grim statistic does not tell the whole story when it comes to the devastating killing capacity of a semiautomatic assault rifle loaded up with high capacity ammunition magazines.

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In the world of emergency medicine, the degree of injury to a trauma patient, especially a pediatric patient, must be extremely severe for he or she to be officially “pronounced” on scene, further treatment withheld, and hospital transport declined.  To have had all twenty-four of the remaining shooting victims still in the building when our ambulance arrived pronounced dead on-scene with zero transported is almost unimaginable.  

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That is the type of weapon we are dealing with here; a weapon so lethal that virtually every human being who came in contact with it that day was not only killed, but so horrendously injured they were pronounced dead on scene by the paramedics who rushed into the building to save them.  

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And that is what it means to be the third ambulance crew on scene of a mass casualty involving twenty-six human beings and to have never treated nor transported a patient.

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Sandy Hook was not an abstraction, no “perfect storm.”  Sandy Hook is the new normal, and the game changer is the dramatic increase in the number and availability of semiautomatic assault rifles and high capacity ammunition magazines.

 

These weapons have been around before. But in the last decade, the “assault rifle” has become one of the most profitable and fastest growing class of weapon in America, the darling of gun manufacturers who, with the enthusiastic help of an enormously powerful and well-funded pro-gun lobby, have promised their shareholders to flood our society with hundreds of thousands more every year.

 

 The result is that when young men like the killers at Sandy Hook and Aurora, Colorado have a psychotic breakdown, they are far more likely to be no more than a basement gun rack, a Wal-Mart, or Craig’s List ad away from getting all the firepower they need to successfully carry out their nightmarish impulses.

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The Founding Fathers, Supreme Court, and We The People have all recognized and upheld the right of governments at all levels to limit “arms” in order to protect public safety.  

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It is also well-established and accepted that no right is absolute, because at some point one absolute right will infringe upon another.  The individual’s "right to keep and bear arms" ends when those arms are so lethal as to represent an unreasonable risk to the safety and rights of their fellow citizens; in this case, the sacred and legal “Right to Life.”

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One of the important questions left in the wake of Sandy Hook is whether the rights of twenty-six first graders and educators were infringed upon by granting one person the right to legally possess a weapon that gave him the ability to kill every last one of them in less than five minutes.

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Peter Houlahan is a journalist and emergency medical technician with the West Redding Fire Department. 

© PETER HOULAHAN.

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