It doesn't have to be this way

Battlefield dressings at your neighborhood Walmart

The Israeli Bandage is a brilliant design. Although it also works for a variety of traumatic wounds, it was specifically designed for bullet wounds received in combat. Curaplex makes a version of this called the Stop the Bleed Basic Kit. It includes a tourniquet, permanent Marker, two pairs of latex-free gloves, an emergency bandage, two rolls of compressed gauze dressing, and a pair of trauma shears. Like the Israeli Bandage it’s modeled after, the kit is designed to stop life-threatening bleeding due to stabbing, crushing, or gunshot wounds until professional help arrives. I first became familiar with the bandage kit in Wilderness First Aid training.

So when I saw a clear box full of them next to the AED defibrillator as I exited my local Walmart Neighborhood Market, I did a double take. These Stop the Bleed kits weren’t for sale. They were in a case, just like the AED ready for emergency use. It was labeled “First Aid”. It was the only thing in the box.

Combat wound dressings.

For emergency use.

At the front of a Walmart.

The store was prepped and ready to respond to heart attacks and mass shootings.

No band-aids or Advil. No antibiotic ointment or Benadryl. Just an AED machine and bullet wound dressings. Lots of them.

I noticed this at the same time the news of yet another school shooting was breaking. This brought the total to 77 people killed or injured in 39 incidents in the year of our Lord 2024.

Y’all, we live in the only “developed” country in the world where this kind of thing is a regular occurrence. By a long shot. In 2020, gun-related injuries were the leading cause of death among American children and adolescents. Between 2020-2022 there were 109 mass shootings in the US. The next closest comparable country during that time had 6.

But I’m not here to argue about how things are, or why they are. I just want us all to recognize THAT they are. That we live in a country where we can reasonably expect that our kids will be shot or traumatized by a shooting every day we send them to school. We live in a country where every time we shop at Walmart there’s a reasonable chance someone will have to break out the Stop the Bleed kits and administer aid to people with gunshot wounds.

If we can recognize that things are the way they are, then maybe we can start to ask the deeper questions, the why and how questions. We can maybe, just maybe, start to imagine that it doesn’t have to be this way and take steps to live into that new imagination. And y’all - it doesn’t have to be this way.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

It doesn’t have to be this way.