Teenage boys' suicide rate is skyrocketing because of firearms access
Teenage boys' suicide rate is skyrocketing because of firearms access
19thnews.org
Teenage boys' suicide rate is skyrocketing because of firearms access
42 comments
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I'm all for gun control, but if suicide rates are up it's because of our society not because of the tool used to commit the act. Suicide rates are the highest they've ever been in modern history and everyone is largely silent about it. Maybe one day humans will realize that they create society and can change it if they choose
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I mean, if someone is suicidal, a tool that has a high chance of failure or a time where the effects can be reversed (like an overdose which might take time to set in and be treatable with prompt hospitalization) is going to lead to fewer deaths than one that is lethal instantly, because some who use it may not try again if they regret it.
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Only 1 in 10 people who survive a suicide attempt go on to die by suicide. The number is much the same the world over, regardless of method.
Very few people survive putting a gun in their mouth and pulling the trigger.
There is a record high number of children doing exactly that with their father's guns. I wonder how many of those fathers claimed the gun was to "keep their family safe"? I wonder how many of them taught their children how to load and fire the round that killed them?
There's actual lives behind those numbers.
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The argument is, gun control treats the symptom and not the cause. Personally, I'm mixed on it. I definitely think we should be severely limiting access to automatic weapons, and others along those lines. But too much control over legitimate hunting weapons is an attack on a lifestyle, and I absolutely see the need for handguns now that I live in an area with very large predators.
Instead, I feel we'd be much better off attacking the social injustice that leads people to feel so helpless and lost.
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This is incorrect. Here's the data:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/
I know it's counterintuitive, but preventing access to easily lethal means of suicide decreases the number of deaths by suicide, and there's a lot of data confirming this. Suicidal crises are spontaneous and temporary MOST of the time, and 90% of people who attempt suicide do not go on to die by suicide by some other means in the future after they are rescued.
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I completely agree with you that firearms greatly increase the likelihood of a suicide attempt and the success of that attempt, and that is a problem. The data shows that clearly. That being the case, so many people being suicidal at all is a more fundamental issue. Of course I support making it less likely that suicidal people will make attempts and be successful, but it's also important to consider why suicidality is such an increasingly severe issue.
Usually when a politician says "We are undergoing a mental health crisis" they mean "The mind is magic so if you think happy thoughts these problems will disappear," but it is very obvious to me at least anecdotally that mental health is generally getting worse which requires broad medical intervention. Sure it doubles the work to do and lazy cowardly Republicans want to pretend that neither problem exists, but both issues are very pressing in my opinion and worth addressing.
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Every time I think about building a deck my planning gets disrupted once I realize I dont have access to the easiest tools for the job.
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That may not be the why, but making it more difficult gives people time to stop and think.
Imagine how many snap decisions we make in life due to just ease.
Not to mention, it’s probably harder to save someone from a gunshot to the head vs a OD.
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I think the core of this is the hurtful aspects of gender roles men and boys face about how to handle and express emotions creates the situation of increased suicidality. Yeah firearms access is going to enable suicidal people to act upon their ideation, but taking it away just leaves you with a depressed/anxious guy, who doesn't have the knowledge or resources to overcome his negative emotions. I'm not saying this in a "it's a mental health issue not a gun issue" way, but society really normalizes the ignorance of mens' emotions and for men to not build support for managing their emotions, be it intimate friendships, healthcare resources, healthy expression of emotions.
I think it's good topic to bring up, because there's a lot of things leading to men not doing too well, and I think it'd be dumb to ignore it, given the rise of acts of violence we've seen in the past decade from men who really feel disconnected or disillusioned with society. Finding out what we can do to help men cope with hardship in a more productive way, and ultimately address the root causes of the issues they face can improve things for men, as well as everyone in society.
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Oh, of course, it's the guns that make them suicidal 🙄
Now, how the hell can we solve the problem if we can not even seriously recognize the cause?
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The guns didn't make them suicidal, but they provide a very easy way to be impulsive.
I'm vaguely suicidal a good chunk of the time. I don't want to be anywhere near a gun.
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It's a lot like saying the French Revolution happened not because of the absolutist royal family, but because the population had access to guillotines. If they didn't have guillotines, they'd probably be using knives or something, and the same can be said about this: If they didn't have a gun, they'd probably hang
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It's not a lot like saying that at all.
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i'm going to remove your comment because i severely doubt you read this entire article in two minutes and this seems like a driveby that's not engaging with the content at all, but with respect to "I don’t think guns are to blame for boys wanting to kill themselves" you are patently false. access to firearms is quite literally the most important variable, because it makes a person significantly more likely to kill themselves[^1]--a correlation between ownership and suicide is particularly established among men specifically. see for example Firearm Ownership and Suicide Rates Among US Men and Women, 1981–2013, which concludes:
Conclusions. We found a strong relationship between state-level firearm ownership and firearm suicide rates among both genders, and a relationship between firearm ownership and suicides by any means among male, but not female, individuals.
if you want a lower rate of male suicide, literally the single most effective policy to that end is less firearm ownership, and lessened access to guns generally. see Firearms and Suicide in the United States: Is Risk Independent of Underlying Suicidal Behavior? in particular, which notes that:
In the United States, where firearms are the method used in more than 50% of all suicides and where roughly 1 in 3 homes contains firearms, even small relative declines in the use of firearms in suicide acts could result in large reductions in the number of suicides, depending on what, if any, method would be substituted for firearms. Consider, for example, the fact that more than 90% of all suicidal acts with firearms are fatal, but suicidal acts with firearms constitute only 5% of all deliberate self-harm episodes. In contrast, fewer than 3% of all suicidal acts with drugs or cutting are fatal but, as a group, such acts constitute approximately 90% of all attempts (33, 34). If even 1 in 10 of the approximately 22,000 persons who attempted suicide with firearms in 2010 (the 19,932 who died and the approximately 2,000 who survived) substituted drugs or cutting, there would have been approximately 1,900 fewer suicide deaths.
[^1]: or harm another person close to them. specific citations are: “Gun Ownership as a Risk Factor for Homicide in the October 7, 1993; “Suicide in the Home in Relation to Gun Ownership,” by Arthur L. Kellermann et al., in New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. 327, No. 7; August 13, 1992; “Homicide and Suicide Risks Associated with Firearms in the Home: A National Case-Control Study,” by Douglas J. Wiebe, in Annals of Emergency Medicine, Vol 41, No. 6; June 2003
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My abstract for the linked article
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42 comments
Kinda hard to convince people suicide is caused by owning a firearm and not, you know, the reasons they committed suicide. Once again pointing societal issues as simply “not enough restrictions”, assuming that’ll fix anything. Waste of time.
It's not the root cause, but I'm sure having easy access to a gun seems a lot quicker and cleaner than, for example, hanging yourself. I know a lot of people who probably wouldn't be around right now if their folks kept guns in the house.
we're getting into the macabre a little bit here but, to be brief: yeah. if it was required people attempt to hang themselves (or overdose, or any other non-firearm method of suicide), pretty much all the data i'm aware of indicates the suicide rate would drop appreciably from where it is now in the US (45,000-50,000 deaths a year).
The path of least resistance from thought to action is very important. I wouldn’t actually know of an easy way if I wanted to kill myself right now. Having a gun in my drawer could easily make a bad day into a final day.
The pro-gun crowd doesn't care. There's no such thing as a body they won't sweep under the rug and suicide makes it easy.
I believe the going theory is firearms are more likely to succeed whereas other means aren't. So you get fewer suicide attempts and more suicides :(
We need to be asking why are teen boys committing suicide at high rates? But also we need to be able to support and help them somehow instead of casting them off on their own once they hit puberty.
PS:
Article goes on to talk about the difficulty of accessing mental health care for black boys, and other factors.
Also
These are all things having little to do with suicide: Japan completely disarmed everyone outside of government in the 90's, and they have better access to healthcare than Americans, but suicide rates only grew. Attention needs to be on root causes, like the explosive rise in loneliness and identifying how to repair some of the social changes brought on by a complete paradigm shift to how humans share information and interact with one another.