So is "mass shooting" becoming a way of life in Chicago?

Sure looks like it, given Chicago's "solution." 

It's come to this, according to NBC Chicago:

The City of Chicago is installing hundreds of kits in city buildings to treat bleeding gunshot victims under a new program officials say could help save lives in an emergency.

Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications announced earlier this month that the city has begun installing 426 wall mounted "Bleeding Control Kits" in 269 buildings across the city. 

Those buildings include City Hall, Chicago Public Library locations, the Chicago Cultural Center, medical clinics, senior centers and more.

Here's more about them:

Each of the kits contain enough supplies to treat eight victims, with tourniquets, gauze, shears, gloves and an instruction manual. 

"The box has eight tourniquets and also gauze, so it's basically to stop the bleeding," Guidice said.

The city purchased the kits for $500 apiece through the federal Urban Areas Security Initiative grant, which was large enough that more will likely be installed in CTA stations and park district sites, according to OEMC.

Officials also noted that bleeding emergencies can stem from multiple causes: "falls, penetrating injuries, gunshot wounds and more."

Sounds a little pricey.  Here's what the kits include:

Perhaps the cases used in the wall mount are jacking up the cost.  Or maybe the labor to install the kits is part of the price.  But it still doesn't look like $500's worth of stuff to me.  It looks like maybe someone got a nice inflated contract.

To start, the kits seem to lack an important thing that might make a difference among flying bullets: hemostatic bandages, which stop uncontrollable bleeding, disinfect, and then dissolve into the body, eliminating their need for removal.  These bandages have been around for five to ten years or more, and they save a lot of lives and limbs on the battlefields as well as in EMT trucks and hospital emergency rooms.

One of them, called WoundClot, was developed by an Israeli company called CSC and is relatively new.  Perhaps the BDS bunch might object to these, given that Israelis developed them, but most Chicagoans would say "thanks."  The Israelis are well known for their high-quality medical products, and these bandages are not just available but quite cheap, running around $6 a bandage, making one wonder why they weren't included.  Free samples are available.

They aren't the only company developing these important triage instruments.  The industry has gotten competitive — two American companies, Qwick-AID and BloodSTOP, made by LifeScience PLUS, also have these products, with BloodSTOP sold on Amazon, $14.95 for a pack of ten, which, given what it is, is very cheap.  Here's another called QuikClot.  There's also a powder product called Bleedstop, endorsed by Mike Lindell, sold on Amazon and being marketed to blood-thinner patients.  Qwick-AID in particular has discovered many markets for these products beyond battlefield uses.  They have a dental page, a tattoo page, a sports injury page, a culinary page — think of how many knife and burn wounds occur in the culinary profession.  There's definitely a market there.  They even have animal applications.  Perhaps they should set up a daily inner-city page for Chicago's market, too.

But that's just one problem here.  There is also the larger picture: why are city officials focusing on this issue, putting first aid kits for mass shootings in every public building when they're demonizing the police and letting criminals with a fondness for guns out?

Why is Chicago's gun crime rate so high, with more than 600 dead so far this year and 2,000 wounded, one of the highest rates in a large city?  Sure, the wound kits are welcome in the wake of no other action, but Chicago officials are treating this situation as part of the flora and fauna of the urban scenery.  What they need to do is go after criminals and stop demonizing the police.  These wound kits are no substitute for a motivated cop on the beat who would prevent the shooting in the first place.

It's a Band-Aid solution for Chicago, comparable to San Francisco handing out needles to junkies to prevent their infection — the problem is that someone is addicted to drugs and trying to kill himself.  The clean needle just buys a little time.  So it is with the wound kits, as helpful as they could be.  Who got the contract and how is probably the bigger story, and the biggest story yet is why Chicago is so plagued with violent crime.  

As I wrote here in 2018:

Most Americans are appalled to read that 63 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, with 10 fatalities.  The numbers are huge, downright massacre-level.  News coverage says Chicago's hospital and emergency rooms are now crowd scenes. ...

What's going on?  All of these attacks are gang-related, according to this report, and are happening in the 6th, 10th, and 11th Districts, all led by Democrats.  What a massive sludge of corruption and thuggery rests behind that.

Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has retweeted an invaluable article from the January 2012 issue of Chicago magazine about how the city's famed violence is all the result of gangs and Democrats being in bed with each other, one hand washing the other, and in those very districts named above.  Democratic politicians sidle up to gang leaders for votes and use their thugs as substitutes for their political organizations.  They muscle voters to the polls for the Democrats, and anyone who rebels gets a beating.  Gang leaders in turn make demands of politicians for protection from police and get flows of city funds from these same Democrats, generally as city subcontractors, calling it "jobs for youth" and "second chances" or something.  The left benefits, so it gives the gangs what they want.

Much easier to shovel some government cash on an overpriced wound kit than to clean up Chicago's politics.

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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