I don’t really know how to start this piece. The topic of suicide is always a little touchy, and for pretty good reason. We here at Bearing Arms understand that better than most, unfortunately. I never worked with Bob Owens, but I respected him, and he’s gone too soon.
I want to end people taking their own lives. If I had my druthers, we’d be pouring tons of money into efforts to understand the mechanisms involved and to actually determine a way to combat the underlying causes that lead to suicide in the first place.
That’s just not going to happen, unfortunately, and it’s possible that we’d never even get close.
Still, I’d like to try.
What I won’t try are any of the things that showed up in this Washington Post piece as a potential solution.
Some people assume it’s futile to restrict access to bridges, pills or guns. The thinking goes: Those who want to kill themselves will simply find another way.
But research refutes that. Creating barriers for one method doesn’t typically push people to another.
Really? Then why do places like Greenland, South Korea, Russia, Taiwan, Japan, and France all have much higher suicide rates than the United States but also have much stricter gun control laws?
No, they’re not all gun suicides, but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?
Let’s also keep in mind the state of social science research. What experiments that are conducted are often impossible to replicate with similar findings, after all.
Moving on…
Suicide risk can surge quickly, with people spending less than an hour or even five minutes between making a decision to die and acting on it. Anything that delays such action — for example, having to unlock a safe to access a gun — gives them time to reconsider or someone else a chance to intervene.
Yet that same delay inhibits people from acting in their own self-defense.
There are somewhere around 2.5 million defensive gun uses in the United States annually. This number has been incredibly consistent over the time I’ve been paying attention to gun rights issues, so it’s pretty firm, I’d say.
Suicides, while awful, account for fewer than 30,000 deaths.
When balancing defensive access to guns versus what someone might do and how they might be dissuaded after opening the safe they have full access to doesn’t seem like a valid bargain for society to make.
However, in the U.S., discussion around guns — even in the context of a traditionally bipartisan topic such as suicide prevention — is a political lightning rod. Proposals to enact nationwide background checks or red-flag laws have failed repeatedly, though some states, typically blue ones, have put some of these restrictions in place. Gun owners and the firearm industry say many of the policies that suicide prevention advocates seek threaten Second Amendment rights, and many policymakers see the topic as a nonstarter.
They see it that way because it’s a threat to our Second Amendment rights.
Look, even if there were firm research that was unassailable about this preventing suicides, I’d still oppose every one of those measures simply because they interfere with my right to keep and bear arms.
The reporters finally get to some comments from the NRA down at the bottom of the piece, which is interesting. See, we all know that most people have a short attention span. They don’t read all the way through a long piece. They read enough to feel like they’ve got a bead on what’s happening and call it a day.
By putting the NRA in the caboose, they do what they can to look balanced, while also doing what they can to make sure few people ever see it.
I know the tricks. I’m not interested in playing them, especially when someone is trying to guilt me into giving up my rights due to the vague promise that it might reduce people taking their own lives.
Like the old commercial said, “Sorry, Charlie.”
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