Sunday, February 11, 2007



In gun-banned Britain surgeons need skills from a war zone: "Dr Tunji Lasoye is woken by the telephone. It is after 2am and within seconds he must decide whether the young man shot in South London minutes earlier requires his help. "If it's a single shooting, probably they will deal with it fine," he says. In that case, over the phone from his home in Thamesmead, he directs operations at King's College Hospital Accident and Emergency Department. If the young man has been shot a number of times, or if several people have been shot, Dr Lasoye will immediately drive to the hospital, in Denmark Hill. He is the lead A&E clinician at King's and in the past five years has become an expert on gunshot wounds. "There are times when it's pretty quiet," he said. "Then you will have unfortunate times like this week when you have three or four in succession." This week in South London there have been four shootings and a fatal stabbing. James Smarrt-Ford, 16, was shot dead while ice-skating, Michael Dosunmu, 15, was in his bedroom when he was killed in what is thought to have been a case of mistaken identity. There were 505 "gun-enabled crimes" in Lambeth and Southwark in 2006. Although not all were shootings, guns were used by criminals at least once a day in the hospital's catchment area.... Next month in a big laboratory in Central London, not far from where Mrs Cope's son was shot, 20 surgeons, mainly from British hospitals, will get a crash course in dealing with bullet wounds from 20 top surgeons, mainly from America."


TN: Pharmacist stops armed robbery using her gun: "Susong Pharmacy in Greeneville usually welcomes the sound of a person entering the store, but not lately. The pharmacy has been robbed twice in the last few months and employees have had enough. 'I hated it happened, but he asked for it in my opinion,' a store employee who asked to remain anonymous said. Police say an armed man entered the store wearing a ski-mask this afternoon, went to the front, and demanded hydrocodone. An unnamed pharmacy technician says the man confronted her. 'It was like deja vu, being that I was just robbed by what looked like the same gentleman back on December 27th,' the woman said. 'He thought he was going to walk in, walk back out, and he was very surprised. He got a little bit more than he asked for.' The woman says her co-worker pulled out her gun and fired a warning shot at the man. She says the first round didn't phase the robber, but the second did. She says the bullet hit the man in his chest and before the robber made it out, the employee fired one more shot."

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