This season on Revisionist History, we're going to the heart of America's gun violence crisis.

Six episodes, some weird, some whimsical, some heartbreaking, some angry.

Because so much of what Americans tend to believe about guns and assault rifles and mass shootings is actually wrong.

We talk about TV Westerns, about a crime in a little town in rural Alabama,

about the nuttiness of the Supreme Court, about the assassination of Robert Kennedy.

The series will air weekly starting Thursday, August 31st.

But you can binge listen to all six episodes early and add free by subscribing to Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts

or by visiting our website, pushkin.fm-plus.

Today we're sharing a short clip from the series.

It takes us to the world of trauma surgery, which is actually why I started on this deep dive in the first place.

We hear a lot about the gun crisis, from law enforcement, activists and politicians,

but not so much from the people who are quite literally treating its victims.

That's who I wanted to talk to, doctors, specifically trauma surgeons, to try and get a sense of their view of the violence.

In this clip, I'm talking to a surgeon named Dr. Babak Sarani on the subject of time.

The number of homicides in any community is a combination of two completely unrelated variables.

The number of people victimized by acts of violence, minus how good a job the medical system does at saving the lives of those victims.

And a lot of times what a murder rate really tells you is how good your doctors are and not how safe your streets are.

But there's a twist on that observation, a really important twist, which the people who treat gunshots for a living have known about for a long time.

So I'm assuming over the course of your career you have treated innumerable gunshot wounds.

Unfortunately true.

This is Dr. Babak Sarani.

He's a trauma surgeon at George Washington University Hospital in Washington DC.

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