Your date and you are leaving prom after a magical evening, and a group of teens from a rival school rolls up and picks a fight that escalates into shots getting fired. What do you do?
If your answer wasn’t “Call 911 first,” Michael McGee understands.
McGee, medical director for the University of Chicago’s Emergency Department in Crown Point, said most people don’t remember the one thing you’re supposed to do when someone is ill or bleeding in front of you. Remembering the phone at all is often half the battle, he told a packed room of student leaders during the Northwest Indiana Youth Leadership Training Thursday morning at Indiana University Northwest.
“What’s the phone number?” McGee asked the kids, grinning at the faces that took a minute to realize what he was asking. “See? You forgot, didn’t you?”
Presented by McGee’s organization, Project Outreach and Prevention (POP) in conjunction with the Sandy Hook Promise, a Newtown, Connecticut not-for-profit dedicated to gun violence prevention since the 2013 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary that left 26 people dead – 20 of whom were children – McGee’s aim is first to give young people the skills they need to become leaders who stay away from unhealthy situations to the best of their ability, he said.
His other goal is more tangible: Teaching young people what to do when they encounter a situation in which someone is losing a lot of blood, whether it’s through getting shot or, say, running with scissors, via Stop the Bleed, a national program launched in 2015 to teach people how to help in an emergency situation after mass shootings started to increase at an even more alarming rate.
As Methodist Hospital’s Director of Emergency Medicine at the time, McGee was more than aware of those horrors, he said.
“Almost two years ago, we had a July 4th weekend that was one of the hottest on record, and there were 17 mass shootings over that weekend. These weren’t people fighting — these were people who were celebrating,” McGee told the students. “Baltimore, Philly, Washington DC, Louisiana, and they shoot for no reason.”
Going back a little further, although COVID-19 seemed to bring out the worst in people, it didn’t cause the uptick in violence, McGee said — it unleashed it.
“In the first three months of COVID, you couldn’t go out to a restaurant, but you could go to the liquor store and you could go to the gun shop; 2.1 million guns were sold in the first three months of COVID. People were lined up for months,” he said. “Now, there are 29 states where, once you turn 18, you don’t even need a permit to own a gun, so you’ve got kids who get mad and ask their siblings who’re 18 or 19 who ‘got that gat.’
“How many tests do you have to take to drive a car? Two.”
McGee acknowledged being “rough” when he was young — boxing and martial arts will give you an edge that way — but even he won’t look for trouble nowadays.
“Would I knock someone out now? Nope,” he said. “People don’t fight fair anymore, and you never know where someone’s mind is. It’s OK to be a punk.”
Each of the kids, with POP groups from East Chicago, Merrillville, Gary and Hammond, got up to learn how to stop someone from bleeding out. Some students, like Isaiah Jones, 14 and from East Chicago, have already gone through the program and were some of the first students to demonstrate, then teach, what they know.
“After I went into the program, I really saw how important it is,” Isaiah said. “I’d rather know it and not have to use it than have to and not know it.”
Sheena Herrod and Dana Jackson-Foggey, of Sauk Elementary in Merrillville, came to the program even though their students aren’t the typical cohort for it. Sadly, that truth may not hold out much any longer.
“We’re seeing exposure to this behavior now more than ever, from siblings and the internet,” Jackson-Foggey, a behavioral specialist, said. “We’ve had a student bring in weapons on the bus, and this was a third-grade kid, so I can see where this would be beneficial.”
“The hardest task, though, is getting parents to take an active role (in working with their kids),” Herrod added. “Many don’t want to take responsibility.”
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
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