Why do some people on the board seem to think that lives lost due to gun suicide don't matter and that gun suicides should not be counted as gun deaths? A suicide attempt with a gun is more likely to be successful than an attempt by other means. So all other factors being equal a higher gun ownership rate means more suicides.
Someone choosing to kill themselves is not my problem. Someone robbing someone else or murdering someone else is also not my problem. You putting restrictions on my rights? That's my problem. You think your loved one is going to kill themselves? Get them committed, there is a whole process for that that protects the rights of all involved and doesn't require ****ing with me. You don't put restrictions on 300 million people because of 20k or so ("gun deaths" are something like 30k a year, about 2/3rds are suicides), you address the 20k as they arise. The way you address a potential suicide is to 1) notice the person needs help, 2) get THAT PERSON help. ****ing with me is not going to help them. Also: What measure are you advocating for here anyway? A total ban? Waiting period? What?
why do some on this board think honest gun owners are more of a threat to society than armed repeat felons? I know I am not suicidal. Therefore I am not threatened at all by a suicide unless the person wants to jump into a crowded street or drive the wrong way on the highway. armed criminals are a threat to other people and the way to deal with armed criminals is far different than how to prevent suicides. the schemes the left has are designed not to do much about either but rather to harass honest gun owners
Suicides by guns are a much different issue than murder by guns. Suicide and guns really have no relationship. Japan, for example, with almost total gun control has a higher suicide rate than our combined murder and suicide rate, despite their total gun control, and our lax gun control.
Someone killing themselves on purpose is a mental health issue not a gun issue. When a house burns down we don't blame it on the house being made of wood and say we should build more concrete houses, we blame it on the source of the fire.
Hopefully, more education and a greater level of awareness of the dangers of gun ownership will lead to that. The propaganda of gun apologists needs to be exposed and countered.
"After we controlled for these characteristics through conditional logistic regression, the presence of one or more guns in the home was found to be associated with an increased risk of suicide (adjusted odds ratio, 4.8; 95 percent confidence interval, 2.7 to 8.5). "Ready availability of firearms is associated with an increased risk of suicide in the home. Owners of firearms should weigh their reasons for keeping a gun in the home against the possibility that it might someday be used in a suicide. (N Engl J Med 1992;327:467–72.)" http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199208133270705 You can substantially reduce your risk of suicide by keeping your guns unloaded and locked up. However, it's best not to own any guns at all.
I prefer to live dangerously. You may choose how you'd like to live. Thank you for your gracious condescension. Now, did they test if it gets worse if you have a gun stashed in every room of the house? Cause I've got a ******* gun, a bedstand gun, a couch gun, and a kitchen gun, all readily accessible and loaded. Should I only have the ******* gun?
Then have your loved one adjudicated mentally unfit and either committed to an institution or to in home care. That would be YOUR JOB, not OUR JOB. There is already a process in place, use the process.
It already is. When you adjudicate them mentally unfit they are barred from possession or ownership and you can remove the items from their home. Hell you can put them in an i love me jacket. That's the whole point. You can take THEIR rights from them because THEY have a problem instead of taking ALL OF OURS. See how that works?
Not really, no. At least not if "interested in saving lives" = only what galileo wants to do. We've offered you the options that interest us, you've refused them. That doesn't mean we don't want to help, it means we don't want to do what you want to do. Period.
First you said "Hopefully, more education and a greater level of awareness of the dangers of gun ownership will lead to that. The propaganda of gun apologists needs to be exposed and countered." Now it's "Gun control can be part of the solution too". Make up your mind. Owning a firearm is a protected right, and any firearm can be used for suicide.
At one point, after a Cousin of mine died, at age 17, he had stopped his motorcycle on the side of the road to replace a tail light, and 3 drunks in a pick-up truck struck and killed him. Many family members wanted to ban motorcycles, insisting motorcycles were the Devil's own invention etc.... Again, to fixate on one method used in Suicides as to regulate it or ban it is indeed fatuous. I believe in a safety valve effect and while suicides using firearms tend to traumatize family members a bit more, sometimes alternative methods are somewhat more hazardous to innocent bystanders as one method popular in N.Y.C. leaving an unlit natural gas appliance on sometimes the gas exploding and killing many innocent people. Suicide is indeed painful to the survivors, and I have lost family, loved ones and freinds to suicide, and so are terminal illnesses, and accidents. Death is a fact and part of life, and sometimes between life and death, there is a lingering sufering and pain too. In Japan many people commit suicide, the more tragic ones are young victims of sexual abuse, and children that do poorly in school and the resulting pressure, without using firearms. You cannot state firearms cause suicide as no causal relationship exists other than to prove a substitution effect when firearms are unavailable. There's no cure for suicide and people commited suicide long before firearms existed.
Ah, Kellermann, you old scoundrel. "In our previous study, we compared suicide rates in King County, Washington, and Vancouver, British Columbia, and found little evidence of a link between firearm regulations and rates of suicide in the community." "People who own firearms should carefully weigh their reasons for keeping a gun in the home against the possibility that it may someday be used in a suicide." Given the 80% growth in the rate of suicide using hanging or suffocation (12,000 deaths in 2015), people who have ropes, cords, bed sheets or plastic bags should carefully weight their reasons for keeping these items in their home against the possibility that they would be used in suicide. Here's the interesting part of this study: " Few victims acquired their guns within hours or days of their death; the vast majority had guns in the home for months or years." Kinda puts paid to the notion that a waiting period will have any effect on gun suicides, don't it?
A false dilemma. We don't have to choose between the two options. A permit to purchase system could make it a requirement for applicants to become educated about gun issues.
"They found a 17 percent drop in the number of gun homicides, and a 6 percent drop in gun suicides in each state that started waiting periods because of the Brady Act." https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/17...ods-brady-act-deaths-homicides-suicides-study Yes, most gun suicides are not committed with recently purchased firearms but a six percent drop is still significant. There are about 20,000 gun suicides each year. That means that a mandatory nationwide waiting period could save at least a thousand lives each year.
