A Chilling Statistic
How an Attitude of ?Blame the Guns? Leads to a Health Crisis Being Ignored
by dischord
(distribution permitted and encouraged)

As U.S. homicide rates, both gun and non-gun, plummet to 35 year lows, we can expect to see grabbers pay more and more attention to suicides involving firearms. Indeed, they are correct when they point out that more gun deaths involve suicides rather than homicides (17,424 vs. 11,798 in 1998).

As they prepare to exploit this fact in coming years to push for still more laws, ostensibly to protect the depressed from themselves, we must be prepared to stop them from taking money, time, resources and attention from mental health and suicide prevention efforts to fuel do-nothing gun controls. A big statistic in our arsenal will be non-firearm suicides.

Suicides completed **without** guns are also higher than firearm homicides ? by 11.5% with latest figures (13,151 vs. 11,798 in 1998). Moreover, non-firearm suicides are increasing at a rate of approximately 8% every five years. Because of this increase, total suicides increased 1997 to 1998 despite shooting suicides declining.

If the trends continue, non-gun suicides will outpace gun suicides and they will outpace all homicides, gun and non-gun combined.

The grabbers love to use the language of health crisis when attacking guns. They still cling to the utterly bogus prediction that guns will surpass motor vehicles in deaths to whip up fear of an increasing gun problem. I would firmly suggest to them that the real health crisis is in suicide.

Where are the ominous new reports? Where are the marching moms? Where are the misty eyed politicians exploiting anguished families for photo ops? Oh, we?ll see them soon enough, but we won?t see much attention paid to victims or their families unless the poor souls happen to pick up guns rather than bottles of pills.

We must not allow them to exploit gun suicide to divert attention from the overall problem of suicide. We must force them to address the real crisis with efforts that actually will work.

Just as our successful efforts against criminal violence have involved attacking criminal violence rather than a popular tool of such violence, and just as our successful efforts against gun accidents have involved attacking dangerous behavior rather than the object of that behavior, our successful effort against the unthinkable act of suicide must ? must ? target the causes of suicide rather than the choice of mechanism.

Indeed, since non-gun suicides soon will overtake firearm suicides, a mechanism-targeting approach would involve the absurdity of attacking ropes, pills and rubber hoses as much as guns.

But the ultimate failure of a gun-control approach to suicide prevention (aside from failing to address nearly half of suicides and growing) is the fact that mental health records are rightly subject to nearly inviolate privacy. Thus our options for ?limited, common sense? gun controls would be few. Background checks, for instance, would be useless without opening up medical records, and any attempt to do that would raise the ire of the medical community.

In fact, the only way to stop gun suicides with gun control, is to *successfully* ban guns. Indeed, this is one reason that Violence Policy Center gives in its call for a handgun ban.

However, a gun ban would cost hundreds of billions of dollars and an army of workers and enforcers ? and it still would have a very low chance of success. It would suck resources not only from suicide prevention, but from the already working violence prevention efforts that we have in place. And after all that damage, it would accomplish nothing.

We cannot let this happen. We cannot let gun grabbers sacrifice the lives of depressed Americans ? thousands of them children and teenagers ? by diverting money, effort and attention to satisfy their authoritarian political agendas.