Rather a pushy thread title, I grant, but I just read this article which confirms something I’ve wondered: The Urge to End It:
It makes sense to me. The gun is an “easy” way to suicide: it’s effective, doesn’t require extensive training for the purpose, isn’t as hard to lay hands on as prescription drugs, doesn’t require that you find a whopping tall building or bridge, etc. It’s the democratic suicide tool. So the impulsive suicide grabs the gun and dies where if the gun weren’t there that same suicide has a good chance of not dying.
That being said, do you care? Does this change anything for you? For me, though I am passively pro-gun (meaning I don’t have one but don’t care if you have eleventy-three of them all dangling from your belt) it makes me even more leery of having one in my house. I don’t think I’m suicidal, but I’m hella impulsive.
Teens are even more impulsive than I am. I don’t think I would ever have a gun in a house where a teen lived.
I hope this isn’t a stupid great debate. You should have a forum for “Probably not all that great a debate but better than a stick in the eye. Slightly”.
Yep. This is pretty much how I feel. I’m in favor of gun ownership for the licensed (& even concealed carry licenses), so long as it’s nice remote theory. I personally don’t own a gun & probably never will. I have a sort of spacy, impulsive personality, prone to (once in a blue moon) suddenly firing at something for no good reason at all. I think a crossbow (still very deadly, but slightly more effort to fire) is as deadly as I want to get in things I would own.
So are you anti-gun, anti-suicide , or anti- civil liberties.
Some people are born bent, at some point in their lives they will commit suicide, regardless of the method. Removing firearms will reduce their options by one tool.
So , hypothetically you have removed all firearms from the world , is your crusade finished or are knives next , then the automobile , then the pills, then we take out bridges, etc.
But no , the above is not going to happen for a variety of reasons, so we do the next best thing , we remove your kid from circulation, put him/her in rubber room and fill em full of some anti depressant at the first sign of suicidal tendencys.
Sort of a gitmo for the darwins.
No your idea idoes not give a good enough bang for the buck, and the amount of suicides that it may Delay will only take place in a future time period with another method.
I own a hand gun and would not use it for suicide* for the simple reason that my Darling Marcie would have to view my body for identification purposes and I wouldn’t put her through that experience.
I’m not married, and when/if the day comes when I must commit suicide it will be with a handgun, and there will be a sign on the door reading, “DO NOT ENTER. CALL POLICE.”
Would it be better for Marcie to wait at your side begging the nurse’s aids to give you one more morphine patch for your colon cancer?
I only care in the sense that I’m glad that there’s a method that works well and is legally available. My only problem with it is that there’s no legal option for suicide that doesn’t leave your body waiting to be found by relatives. Ideally you’d be able to go to a hospital and have it done in a way that facilitated all the various after-the-fact issues of body disposal, certainty that it wasn’t a staged murder, etc.
Freedom to live your life equals the freedom to end it. Christian morality needs to piss off out of public morality where there’s no real world reason to feel affected.
I confessed at university to a mandatory adviser that I often thought about driving off a bridge or “What would happen if I jumped in front of that bus?” She told me that was normal and not a true suicidal ideation, but it still freaked me out.
I can’t say that I do care. Suicide, while tragic, is a choice, not an accident. There are other ways to kill yourself much more painfully than a firearm. So, if the choice is quick and sure or slow and painful, pulling the trigger is far better, if not at all pleasant for those that are left behind.
In the article, it seems clear that those are not the only choices and that the availability of firearms in effect causes suicides amongst those who would likely not otherwise die. The article debunks the idea that people will simply substitute another method. They might, but there appears to be a significant chance that they will not.
I feel as if people are arguing things that I have not said and the article has not said. Perhaps a stick in the eye would have been a bit better.
The thing to remember about darwins , is that its not hard to treat them, its identifying them.
So far that I have seen, there are three types of suicides , this based on no particular study that I know of , but…
One is a romantic suicide, bunch of kids get together and form a sucide pact
Second is an individual who has either suffered a loss financially or whatever ,and is normally sane person , the french had a saying about blood forgives sins or something like that. You see it on tv where somebody is offered a pistol and some quiet time.
Third is an individual who shows no outward signs of being a darwin, captain of school teams, hot girlfriend, popular in school, yada yada.
My cousin was the third type , we never seen it coming. So objectively he was a time bomb waiting to go off. If it was not a shotgun , then it would have been something else.
Your post struck me as being Anti-gun, remove the weapons and we may save just one child.
Your thread title was clear as day , but your message needed clarity regarding what you propose to do about it, or put to proposal.
I’m not seeing why we should want to preserve the lives of lazy suicidal people?
Overall, why should I care if people are more likely to kill themselves if it is an easy and painless thing to do? Do we need more people on the planet? Is there some holistic reason that it’s bad for dead people to come into existence?
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
Some suicides are needful things. Some are not. Those that aren’t break my heart. (Those that are but are prevented also break my heart, but that is not the point of the post.)
It is very hard for me to keep from using Pit-worthy language in this response. I’ve deleted several responses that would rightly get me suspended.
Please do not refer to persons who commit suicide as “darwins.” Please do not imply that people who suffer from grief or illness to such a degree that death comes to seem preferable have done the gene pool a favor by removing themselves from it. Please consider that doing so is hurtful, callous, ignorant, and vile. Please consider the implications of what you are saying.
I have to say that given your OP and the forum, I’ve been rather amazed by the ability of posters to come in and simply throw out an opinion and then support that opinion by making unsupported statements rather succinctly contradicted by what you’ve provided.
Anyway, I’m a bit divided on the subject. I think the Supreme Court was correct in its most recent interpretation of citizens having fairly broad rights to obtain and own firearms. From a legal stand-point, I’m generally in support of gun rights.
From a public health perspective, I absolutely believe that we should do everything we can to reduce gun ownership. I think that medical professionals and others in a position to deliver public health messages (teachers, etc.) ought to actively discourage gun ownership.
I don’t proclaim to know how to reconcile the two views from a legislative standpoint. Perhaps we could do more to tax firearms and spend the revenues on suicide prevention?