WARNING TO THE SQUEAMISH: THIS POST HAS GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF SUICIDES.
YOU MIGHT WANT TO AVOID IT.
At the inception of this thread I thought I would not participate. As a retired Secret Service Agent my response to all inquiries about whether or not I was carrying a gun has been, "I quit carrying a gun when I learned to kill with my bare hands."
In fact to this day I will not give a straight answer to that question to anyone other than a law enforcement officer. Paranoid? Forty years in law enforcement can make you "cautious" of even casual inquiries of this kind.
I decided to jump in on the thread when I saw that the discussion had turned to suicide and in particular the claim that the suicide rate is higher where gun availability is higher.
First, just a word about the basis for my remarks. After my Secret Service career I had a second career as a deputy sheriff here in Florida. I was a detective in Organized Crime, a Tactical Flight Officer in the Aviation Unit and on a specialty team as a Hostage Negotiator.
Hostage Negotiators are involved in a number of "non-hostage" crisis situations, notably calls regarding suicidal individuals. My negotiations have involved talking potential jumpers down off of bridges and talking people armed with rifles or pistols into relinquishing their firearms and giving up. Virtually every call I responded to, including the jumper, involved someone who was armed. I never had a person with whom I negotiated go through with the suicide.
In order to qualify for this specialty required a great deal of classroom training, role playing training and an apprenticeship prior to becoming the lead negotiator.
What I am about to say comes from that training. I respectfully suggest that many of the intellectual studies that utilize statistics to demonstrate the correlation between a high incidence of suicide with the readily availability of firearms can be explained easily.
The fact is that firearms are one of the easiest and most efficient methods of suicide. So, yes, where there are more guns their use in suicides may be more prevalent. Where I think the intellectuals go wrong is in their implicit assumption that if guns were not available then the individuals would not commit suicide by some other means. I have seen suicides where the person hanged himself, ran a garden hose from his car tailpipe into his car, ran out into highway traffic to be struck by a car, drove into a bridge abutment at high speed and even menaced the police with a gun to compel them to shoot him; what is called "suicide by cop."
The methods that I have seen as most ineffective have been medication overdoses and cutting of wrists.
There are many other conclusions that are drawn from statistics that I don't believe are justified by the statistics, but are reflective of the anti-gun bias of the person drawing the conclusions. But, I've already gone long here, so I'll close.
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Never pick a fight with an old man. He knows he can't whip you so he will have to shoot you.
P.S. There are several retired Secret Service agents in our area.