Once again, my Glock will one day apparently call out to me to kill myself:
What the authors of the Second Amendment did not foresee, however, is that when people own a gun, they unwittingly raise their risk of getting hurt and killed — because the odds that they will one day use their gun to commit suicide are much larger than the odds they will use their gun to defend themselves against intruders, muggers and killers.
There’s a big problem with using statistics like this to determine risk. My gun has a 0% chance of being used in a sucide, because I am not suicidal! Once more, I have never been, and don’t ever see myself becoming suicidal. I can think of few suggestions more condescending than suggesting I not possess something because “you might hurt yourself with that!”
That the media has been reduced to selling the idea that “Guns cause suicide” rather than the idea that gun cause crime seems to indicate we’ve won on the latter debate, and the former is so utterly ridiculous to thinking people that I don’t expect it’ll find much resonance in the public.
“If you bought a car today, I could tell you the risk of death by DUI to you and your family members is going to be two- to tenfold higher over the next 20 years,” Harvard’s Miller said. “There are not many things you can do to increase your risk of dying tenfold.”
Sounds about the same…
You’ll shoot your eye out! I think these were the same people that wouldn’t let me have a BB Gun when I was 13.
If guns caused suicide, I would be dead a thousand times over.
Articles on guns and suicide have been popping up all over the place.
The NYT did a very long story, and while it did not make an overt call for gun control, I think it was laying foundation.
Several years ago I read Gary Kleck’s Targeting Guns and he did a good job of knocking all this down.
I found an online version here:
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcgvsuic.html
“firearm availability measures are significantly and positively associated with rates of firearm suicide, but have no significant association with rates of total suicide.â€
and if people don’t use firearms, they can still turn to…
razor blades, knives, pills, ropes, cops, cars, bleach, tons of booze…
I wonder what the most common method of suicide in Japan is?
Gravity?
Japan has been having trouble with home made poison gas (Hydrogen Sulfide) made form household detergents for suicides. It recently passed CO poisoning.
I do think the article has a reasonable point: people with the “average” amount of suicidal tendencies probably should not own guns, as the “average” risk of a suicide attempt plus having the most effective means at one’s disposal translates into an above-average risk of a suicide attempt succeeding.
Xrlq
Gun control is not suicide prevention. Suicide prevention is a noble cause but it needs to be addresses directly, not with the same worthless policies that have failed at reducing crime.