Mass Murder

For John, BLUF:  Do we do a good job of identifying the real threats?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Yet another medical serial killer

Here is the sub-headline:

Niels Högel:  German ex-nurse admits killing 100 patients

From Samizdata, Natalie Solent, of Essex, 30 October 2018.

Here is the lede plus a little bit:

A hundred victims, and it is not even the BBC’s top story.

Towards the end of the last century I visited a very nice elderly couple, the husband of whom was a retired doctor. I noticed a flyer or newsletter sitting on their kitchen table with a heading something like “Doctors against gun violence”. At that time Dr Harold Shipman had fairly recently been arrested and the sheer number of his victims – more than two hundred – was beginning to emerge. I could not help thinking that, given that the number of people Shipman had killed by medical means exceeded by a great margin the death toll of the two largest shooting mass murders that had then occurred in the UK, Dunblane and Hungerford, maybe there was scope for a rival pamphlet called “Gun owners against medical violence”. The thought remained unspoken, of course, and a good thing too.

I wonder what Mass Aaorney General Maura Healey thinks about this?  Should we be treating medical tools like we do the right to bear arms?

Regards  —  Cliff