This surgeon treated victims of the Highland Park shooting. Here's what he saw that shaped his views on guns

On July 4, Dr. Leon Benson was picking up his daughter from the train station when he saw a rush of emergency vehicles heading north toward Highland Park.?

He started calling hospitals where he’s on staff. The emergency department at NorthShore Highland Park Hospital was grateful for the call. Benson, an orthopedic surgeon, soon arrived at an ER that was flooded with people.?

That morning, the Chicago suburb had become the latest community to be devastated by a mass shooting – this one taking the lives of seven people and wounding 46 others at an Independence Day parade.?

When Benson arrived at the hospital, the shooter – who targeted people from a rooftop – still hadn’t been caught.?

Gun violence in the U.S. has been increasing in recent years and spiked during the pandemic, reversing a decades-long trend in falling murder rates. Mass shootings – defined as events where a gunman kills four or more strangers in a public place – also have been increasing, both in frequency and in fatalities, according to data from The Marshall Project, a not-for-profit news organization that reports on criminal justice.?

Benson, by his own admission, is not anti-gun. And he acknowledged the role that mental health plays in mass shootings. But what makes mass shootings particularly deadly, he emphasized, is the weapon of choice. That’s where he wants lawmakers to focus their attention.

“Even the most entry-level rifles are much more destructive than the average handgun,” he said. “That’s what I can attest to, seeing the wounds.”

He’d like to see rifle purchasers undergo the sort of screenings required in Israel, where gun owners must state the reason they want to purchase a gun and undergo a background check including mental health history – his middle-of-the-road solution to a hotly-charged, polarizing issue.

“In my opinion, being analytic, it might be better to suggest that if you’re going to create legislation,” he said, “maybe we’ll make it a little harder to buy those weapons that are more destructive and that would start with rifles.”

The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.

LinkedIn News: Tell me about where you were on the day of the shooting.

Benson: My daughter was coming home to visit us. She was taking the train from the city down to the Highland Park station. She called before she got on the train, saying there was some sort of crisis going on in the city of Highland Park. So I met her at a train station about five miles south of where she would normally get off.?

We saw ambulances and emergency vehicles heading north towards Highland Park. I called the operating rooms at the hospitals where I'm on staff to find out if they were staffed and they were in good shape. But then I called the Highland Park emergency room and they indicated they wouldn't mind having some help because they were getting a ton of patients. So I dropped off my daughter and I went over to Highland Park Hospital around 11:30 a.m. The shooting was about an hour earlier than that. I was in the emergency room for two or three hours just helping them sort through patients. I'm an orthopedic surgeon and I can usually help them triage and treat the patients who have extremity injuries so that's what I did.

LinkedIn News: What kinds of injuries did you see?

Benson: There were two kinds of injuries. Some people were shot and others were just hurt because they were running away in a crowd. Unfortunately, the people who died died at the scene.

The patients that I started helping mostly were people with gunshot wounds. Most of them were just through-and-through injuries because the weapon that was used was a high velocity rifle. Most of them did not have to get admitted after they were treated. And a lot of people were also there because they were struck by shrapnel, either by the bullet fragmenting or the projectile hitting concrete or stone or glass and then sort of fragmenting.?

LinkedIn News: You see a fair number of gun injuries in your line of work. Was there anything different about this day?

Benson: I'm in the suburbs, with a big orthopedic practice called the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute. But I'm also a faculty professor at the University of Chicago and their emergency room is one of the busiest trauma centers in the country, partly because they wind up seeing a lot of criminal violence that occurs in the city. Now, to be clear, there's a difference between a mass shooting and the criminal mischief that goes on every weekend in Chicago, which usually has at least 50 people shot and five people killed every single weekend of the year. That tends to be a handgun and a close-up environment.?

[In mass shootings], the weapon that's used typically is a rifle, which allows the shooter to be at some distance from the crowd, and by virtue of that, the muzzle energy of those weapons is higher.?

People talk about assault weapons in this country and that's not, in my opinion, a particularly helpful term because it's not very precise. And people who know a lot about firearms or believe strongly in their Second Amendment rights will correctly point out that that term doesn't distinguish one weapon from another because you can call anything an assault weapon. You can call it an assault pencil if you attack somebody with it. The point is, though, that there is a big distinction in firearms between weapons that have lower muzzle energy and higher muzzle energy. The damage that's done to somebody is dependent on the velocity of the bullet, how fast it's going, and how big of a bullet it is.?

Handguns have a muzzle velocity that is generally limited because the barrel is short. Otherwise, it’s too heavy to hold. A handgun might shoot a bullet at 1,200 feet per second, but with a smaller rifle, that jumps up to like 2,200 feet per second and higher.?

LinkedIn News: After the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., a radiologist published an article in The Atlantic that talks about how bullets themselves are doing a lot more damage. Have you seen that as well?

Benson: There are some bullets that are designed purposely so that they mushroom out. That is, instead of being a solid piece of lead that goes through the body, if it hits something, it tends to fan out. It has a jacket designed to expand.?

In the world of firearms, the hollow point bullets have two purposes: one potentially not to exit that person, which is protective of people or bystanders around them. And the second point is that it is more destructive and potentially lethal to that person.

LinkedIn News: What else do you want people to know?

Benson:? I can tell you that a lot of the staff are traumatized. There have been other shootings that have occurred around the hospital that I have been close to. After one that occurred [at Highland Park Hospital], a couple of nurses quit permanently. It's a serious mental health challenge to get over that.

When I was walking around the [Highland Park] emergency room, I found it to be a little therapeutic to be able to do something, to be involved. I'm used to that stress and energy. I'm used to that atmosphere.

But you know, I came home after that thinking, what the hell's happening? I took my kids to that parade for 18 years in a row. We go to that Walker Brothers restaurant [on the parade route] all the time. It freaks you out when you realize it's something so familiar. It brings it close and personal.