![]() There are places that are more likely to produce devastation from the initial blow, and those would include again, that blow to the nose. Once you are tearing, you don’t know whether the aggressor is reaching for a weapon of any kind, so a blow to the nose, certainly a blow to the eyes, would render one at a great disadvantage. Margulies: The real answer is, “It is anywhere.” The fact that a blow to the nose can produce tearing, as it almost always does, means that you can’t see what is coming and that puts you at a tremendous disadvantage for the rest of the attack. ![]() We switch now to an interview format to share his words with readers.ĮJournal: Cases in which people died after a single punch bring us to a surprising conclusion about the human body’s fragility! To get us started, could you identify areas of greatest vulnerability to blunt force trauma of the sort an empty-handed aggressor could inflict with such immediacy as to result in death or such disability that we would be unable to seek out and benefit from medical intervention?ĭr. Margulies is a skilled lecturer whom I was privileged to question at length on this topic recently. In addition to a long career in emergency medicine, Dr. Margulies, MD, MPH, FACEP to explain blunt force trauma injuries in this first segment of a two-part study of defending against physical attack. With that in mind, we called on long-time emergency medicine physician and Network member Robert A. A big part of defending use of force is being able to document knowledge of the danger prior to facing the threat. ( ).Īll across the country, armed citizens face punishment for justifiable use of countervailing deadly force, and they are jailed, often prosecuted, and face a very difficult, uphill fight to prove the necessity of their use of force against an assailant’s fists, feet, knees and elbows. To offer just two examples, in Wyoming, a murder conviction was overturned in late 2013.The Wyoming Supreme Court found that a Freemont County prosecutor’s closing statements to the jury were inaccurate, asserting in part, “In the state of Wyoming, there is a law against shooting an unarmed man.” ( ) Oregon courts also have sometimes failed to acknowledge fists as dangerous weapons. Still, society and the criminal justice system are eager to prosecute those who use guns to defend against ostensibly unarmed assailants. These are only a fraction of the many anecdotal reports of death from an empty hand attack. North of Seattle, WA in 2014, two teens agreed to resolve a fight by allowing one to punch the other in the face he died from blunt force trauma to his head, after being hit in the face with a closed fist. A week later the ref was dead, having gone into a coma with swelling in his brain. In 2013, a large, 17-year old player punched a soccer referee in Utah in the face. ![]() At trial, a Clark County, NV forensic pathologist identified the cause of death as blunt-force trauma from hitting his head on the floor. ![]() At 5’5”, 142 pounds, the woman was reportedly not a bodybuilder nor was she trained in martial arts nor did she possess any extraordinary fighting skills.Īnother well-publicized case from 2011 tells of a tourist in Las Vegas who was punched, fell to a tile floor and hit the back of his head. The autopsy showed that an artery burst in his neck and that he died from brain hemorrhage caused by blunt force trauma. In 2011, a 25-year old man took a $5 bet to be punched in the face by a woman. It is not hard to find reports of deaths from blunt force trauma. Can the armed citizen justify defensive display of a firearm or shooting to stop a physical beating? A common misunderstanding arising from this general guideline is the very real danger of crippling or even lethal outcomes from blunt force injury inflicted during a purely physical attack. The long-time standard for self defense allows use of force proportional to that used by the attacker.
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