Injuries Not Accidents

Esther Schoenfeld

This was a bit of a rough week, I think, but we got a lot done. The weather was oppressive and made everyone feel irritable. Because of both the weather and our assignments, we stayed inside more than usual, and did a lot of written work. It is hard to read and write for so many hours at a time, and Team Woodlawn deserves to feel proud for what we accomplished this week!

We wrote our project proposal, read and discussed our chapter (“Injuries not Accidents”) of Prescription for a Healthy Nation (PfaHN), planned our Wednesday in Devon, wrote a questionnaire that we will give to local businesses in order to gather information for our resource manual, learned how to write resumes (and, in particular, how to convey to employers the awesomeness that is the SSP experience!), and began research for our bullying curriculum. Out of all of those things, I am most proud of our PfaHN discussion. Olivia and Aliyah did such a fantastic job explaining the chapter, leading a discussion, and bringing to light some of the complicated and philosophical issues that come into play.

“Injuries not Accidents” is about the toll injuries take on Americans, and how many of these injuries are easily prevented by making changes to the environment.

Here are some fascinating statistics:

- “Injuries are the number one killed in America for every age group from one to thirty-four” (191).

- “Among teenagers and young adults, the top three causes of all deaths are unintentional injury, homicide, and suicide, in that order” (191).

- Car crash is the number one cause of fatal injury, followed closely by firearms (191).

Some people think that injuries--whether accidental or purposeful--are the individual’s fault. This attitude is particularly prevalent in debates over gun laws, and is encapsulated in this slogan used by the gun industry and gun lobbyists: “Guns don’t kill people, people do.”

PfaHN questions this premise, arguing that a violent environment and the physical object of the gun itself can plan a huge role in whether or not someone dies. According to this argument, people don’t always make rational decisions, especially when they are angry or depressed. If a man kills another person with a gun in a moment of passion, it doesn’t follow, the book argues, that the man would still have been a killer had the gun not been there. If a person is feeling completely hopeless and depressed, and he has a gun, then he will use it on himself. But if the gun is not there, then it is unlikely that the person will choose a more difficult and painful method of suicide. In other words, people don’t just use guns to do things they would have done anyway; the presence of the gun itself, in many cases, affects us and causes us to kill.

This idea--the idea that changing the environment is the easiest and most effective way to change individual behavior--holds a lot of merit, in my opinion. This statistic, in particular, really seems to back it up: “In 1976, after the District of Columbia adopted a virtual ban on handgun sales, even though people could drive a few short miles to Virginia or Maryland to buy guns, gun suicides dropped by 23 percent, and suicides by other means did not rise to take their place” (202).

In response to our reading, our group began to think of ways to implement the concept of changing the environment into our own anti-bullying project. Our project includes a curriculum, which is meant to change the minds of individuals. However, the high school students pointed out, part of our project is to create an atmosphere, or environment, in which bullying is discouraged. One of the ways we plan to do this is to hold an anti-bullying poster contest at the high school. The winner will get a prize, and the posters will be hung up around the school.

What do you guys think? Should the focus be on changing the person or changing the environment? If changing the environment is important, what are some other ideas in that spirit that we can implement into our project?