Higher Rural Suicide Rates Driven by Use of Guns

“Suicide rates in rural areas of Maryland are 35-percent higher than in the state’s urban settings, a disparity that can be attributed to the significantly greater use of firearms in rural settings, according to new research from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health....

"Nestadt says laws that allow the transfer of firearms from one person to another in an emergency – for example, making sure that someone who has suffered from suicidal thoughts has someone else hold onto their gun for a while – could be helpful. Also, he says, efforts to help gun shop owners flag people who are potentially buying firearms to kill themselves would be a good step. He says gun shop owners could be instructed to monitor buyers who only purchase a few bullets or people who don’t seem interested in how to maintain the gun or who don’t seem interested in, say, a hunting license or home security. Such efforts are already underway in states like Maryland and New Hampshire, due in part to the work of firearms dealers’ associations."
https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2017/higher-rural-suicide-rates-driven-by-use-of-guns.html

Could requiring gun owners to regularly pass mental health evaluations reduce the suicide rate? Attempts to commit suicide with a gun are very likely to be successful.

 

Access to a gun will increase the chance of “successful” suicide but that doesn’t necessary mean formal ownership of the gun and while guns will be involved in a lot of suicide attempts, they’re far from being involved in all. If you can justify mandatory mental health evaluations for (registered) gun owners, why couldn’t you justify them for everybody?

 

It did not work for David Katz. Nor did it work for Ian David Long, both of whom were examined, permitted by their individual states to legally own firearms, and went on to commit mass shootings before ultimately committing suicide.

 

Not to a degree it would result in a meaningful difference in lowering the suicide rate.

What needs to be addressed is the root cause of suicide versus going after a tool used in such, take away firearms and the person with intentions of taking themselves out will still try to do so and failing to complete the job could actually result in even greater suffering for that person and a heavier burden on the family and society.

Something is changing for the worse in the U.S. and I honestly believe is not a single factor but a number of factors which eventually collide and push some people over the edge.

I believe the primary driver is low self esteem and a reliance on material things, too many people nowadays measure their self worth by things that where never considered in the past such as the number of likes they have on social media, followers etc..

The days of knowing all people are worthy and wealthy by measurements not in likes, dollars or owned objects, but by who they are, seem to be fading into the past, too many are driven by the desire to impress and wow their peers versus having a desire to impress one's self.

This literally started in the 50's, really got going in the late 60's when the non-material hippies went full bore material and a second branch of the decline was caused by Johnson's "War On Poverty" which has caused many societal problems, versus solving anything, the Boomers took it to the top and also are making up a large part of suicides as the age and realize all of their material things are worthless and as a result they feel they are too.

 

Suffocation/hanging suicides are very successful, tot the tune of 11,500 deaths per year. The gun suicide rate increased 13% from 1999 to 2016; the hanging/suffocation suicide rate increase 89% since 1999. Should we require mental health evaluations for anyone buying bed sheets, ropes, belts, etc.? What would happen if a gun owner refused to undergo periodic mental evaluation? How would the authorities know who was and wasn't a gun owner?

We only have about 55,000 llicenced psychiatrists in the US, and about half of those will hit retirement age in the next 10 years. If we required the 80 million gun owners to visit a psychiatrist every year there wouldn't be any hours left for the mentally ill.

 

As I have posted elsewhere, if you want to begin to understand some of the factors in the suicide trends, read Alvin Tofler’s Future Shock where it and other noticible trends were predicted as an inevitable consequence of the combination of population mobility, technology proliferation and population growth. His book made sense then and has been fairly accurate in its predictions and it’s a future still unfolding.

 

If someone is aware they are being evaluated it can be nearly impossible assess risk if the subject doesn’t want their mental state known; its easy to project for expectations. In any system that does mass production of mental evaluations will have huge potential not only for error, but there exists no consensus for future risk analysis based on an mental evaluation broadly applied. It’s easy to see in 20/20 hindsight, but most of the most prolific serial killers accumulate long lists of victims because they can effectively mask their mental states and live without those around them being aware.
If there is any potential indicator of future risk, it is a history of violence, violence often incrementally becoming more pronounced.

 

People have a right to end their lives whenever they wish......and that is almost always when they feel that their quality of life has deteriorated to an unacceptable level or they just can't cope anymore.

So why all the hysteria about them having an excellent way to do it?

In ten or twenty years suicide will be universally approved.

Much ado about nothing.

 

Study: Gun Control Laws Have No Impact on Suicide, Homicide

https://www.wibc.com/blogs/tony-kat...wLOTYZLzCofHT2Cu4a7Swjxcb7D1wd2OPaJRW3nqQUmIM

 

Very misleading title and how is it relevant to this thread? The study discussed in your article is about UBC's in California. There's already a thread about that.

 

"In fact, Kevin Hines and Ken Baldwin are little more than strangers who happen to share an incredible connection. Both jumped off of the Golden Gate Bridge [in an attempt to commit suicide] - and survived."
https://abc7.com/society/i-survived-jumping-off-the-golden-gate-bridge/2012267/

Thank goodness they did not shoot themselves. They very likely would not be alive today. Guns kill.

 

Oh the anecdote king. How about the 11,500 who hanged themselves each year?

 

I might agree if it's a decision made in a rational state of mind and not an impulsive suicide attempt. It's not uncommon for a person who has survived a suicide attempt to look back and realize that they made one of the worst mistakes of their life.

 

The vast majority of those that attempt suicide and survive will not go on to die by suicide

 

Change that number to more than 15,000 if hanging yourself was as fatal as shooting yourself. Means matter.

 

And some look back and say the mistake was not using a more reliable method.

There are many different situations encountered in this issue but nothing justifies overruling the right to decide not to live.

Each person must decide that for himself or herself.........ideally with professional counsel, but not necessarily.

 

No. No one looks back and says that. Should we let a person kill himself because he thinks martians are coming to torture him?

 

Very true the, right to live and decide when to no longer live, is decision, given to each and all of us by our creator.

Others may disagree, but they are nothing more than annoying gnats in that decision process.

 

Those annoying gnats have current law on their side. You do not. Lol

 

The relevancy is that firearm-related restrictions do nothing to prevent either suicides, or homicides, from being committed, in the united states. Not at the state level, not at the city level, not at the federal level. No firearm-related restriction, existing or proposed, can prevent so much as even a single loss of life from occurring.

 

A wild and unsubstantiated claim. Regardless of the effectiveness of California's UCB law, other gun laws can reduce suicides:

"Still, he says, previous research has shown that restricting easy access to firearms – for example, by implementing permit requirements for purchasing handguns – has not only slowed homicides, but suicides too."
https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2017/higher-rural-suicide-rates-driven-by-use-of-guns.html

"But states with strong gun laws had lower firearm and overall suicide rates regardless of the strength of laws in bordering states."
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...d-to-fewer-suicides-and-murders-idUSKBN1GH39W

"The presence of a gun dangerously compounds the risk of impulsive acts of violence, especially suicide. Waiting periods, or 'cooling off' laws, create an important window of time for gun purchasers to reconsider their intentions, which can lead to a change of heart and a saved life....

"In fact, states with waiting period laws for gun purchases have lower rates of suicide. Research published in the American Journal of Public Health showed that states with waiting period laws had 51% fewer firearm suicides and a 27% lower overall suicide rate than states without such laws."
https://lawcenter.giffords.org/gun-laws/policy-areas/gun-sales/waiting-periods/

 

Exactly.

 

No.

We should have you take him home and counsel him.

 

Just pay me and I will

 

And yet you pick a state with rather strict gun control laws.