SUICIDE IN THE GUN DEBATE
SUICIDE IN THE GUN DEBATE
SUICIDE IN THE GUN DEBATE

Speaking from Personal Experience to people
who’ve lost a loved one to suicide with a
gun and are now working to restrict gun rights

by Angel Shamaya
Founder & Director, KeepAndBearArms.com
[email protected]

[[ To read this document with all italicizing,
bolding and underlining to catch the author's
intended emphasis, go to:
http://www.KeepAndBearArms.com/suicide1 ]]

My only blood brother ended his own life with a
shotgun. I love him dearly, and I still miss him
often. He was 17 years old, a senior in high school,
and he had many friends and no known enemies. His
departure left a gaping hole in our family that can
never be filled.

A week later, his best friend and a dear friend of
mine ended his own life with a shotgun, as well,
adding to what already felt like a mountain of
agony caving in on my soul. It took me years to
recover completely.

I have known a handful of other good, decent people
who, for one reason or another, chose to end their
own lives, as well. Some of them used guns; others
used rope, car exhaust and pills.

I share this with you not because I want sympathy. I
don’t need or want anyone’s sympathy, pity, or any
other such sentiment; I’ve gone through my pain and
come out the other side a better person with deeper
compassion and understanding. I share this with you
because I am going to say some things about suicide
and the gun issue that — were I not the survivor of
a suicided family member — could be called anything
from insensitive to calloused and downright cruel.
But I’ve been there, so such labels cannot fairly be
applied to me.

This article is intended as a tool to effectively
counter the anti-self-defense “suicide argument” for
stronger controls on the constitutional, God-given
right to keep and bear arms. Anyone who lost someone
to suicide with a gun and is now calling for the
restriction of the rights of others will require
courage and gut-level honesty to read the following.

Reprint permission is granted as long as it is kept
intact, including this introduction and the footer
of the article referring back to KeepAndBearArms.com.

Finally, to my family and friends whose loved ones
are mentioned in this report: I love you. Please,
please understand what I am doing with this article,
and please call me if you want to talk.

Angel Shamaya

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

THE PROBLEM

Many anti-self-defense leaders today are bolstering
the numbers of people dying by gunshot with the
suicides that are taking place — increasing the
legitimate “death by criminal misuse of gun” tally
in hopes the larger numbers will further their
pre-confiscation agenda. (Yes, pre-confiscation.
The licensing of rights and registration of guns —
now en vogue for anti-rights people — are the two
major ways in which guns have consistently throughout
history — on American soil and abroad — become the
easy targets of successful confiscations.)

In many cases — some of them widely publicized by
gun control organizations and the liberal media —
people enduring the pain of having lost a loved one
through death-by-choice-with-firearm are now
screaming for restrictive gun controls and even gun
bans.

While gun-related violence is on a continual, steady
decline, suicide deaths are being used, in part,
because they are needed to “get the job done.” People
shout out for pity and compassion for the survivors
of suicides in a call to infringe on the rights of
lawful, peaceable gun owners in hopes, they say, of
preventing future incidents of suicide.

And, without inflating the numbers of gun-related
deaths with suicide statistics — and the pain-laden,
heart-jerking stories that go with them — with gun
violence going down and down again, the gun grabbers
are reaching, many of them deifying their lost loved
ones before God and country as if, somehow, the dead
person wasn’t responsible — that it was the “evil
gun” that caused the act.

And some people actually buy it, hook, line and sinker.

Unfortunately, not only are these users of people’s
suicides for political manipulation and social
engineering doing so against the grain of evidence
supporting lawful ownership of firearms as a means
of reducing crime and death in general, they are
emotionally imbalanced, as well, oftentimes to the
point of being unable to rationally discuss the
very issues about which they so loudly bellow. Their
call to infringe on gun rights, while satisfying a
personal need to “do something” actually costs more
lives than it saves, and their own inability to deal
in reason, logic and fact is partially responsible
for the lost lives incurred.

WHY DO PEOPLE WHO LOSE SOMEONE
TO SUICIDE BLAME THE GUN?

When something goes wrong, people tend to want
to blame something, anything, and this is never
truer than when a great deal of pain is experienced.
And, arguably, the deepest pain we as human beings
will ever feel involves losing someone very close
to us.

When Michael took his own life, the poetry that
tore its way through my pen was so steeped in
heartache, confusion, shock, horror and other
powerful emotions, the very paper upon which I
wrote was many times covered in tears. I hurt,
really really bad. I went through a rich variety
of “blamings.”

I blamed myself and my parents, his teachers, society,
and even God. And, for a time, I blamed “that damned
shotgun.”

I needed to pin that awful, gut-wrenching pain on
something, anything, in my seemingly downward spiral
of agony, if only to have some target upon which I
could focus all of my aching, gnawing sense of loss
and despair. I felt victimized, and I needed to vent
that tremendous sense of helplessness upon whatever
must be the real cause of my anguish. So overwhelmed
by the rich flood of seemingly endless and unrelenting
emotions, I needed to lock onto an “enemy” and tear
its flesh, lashing out for what felt at the time like
the gravest injustice I could ever or would ever feel.

Such is human nature. Ask any psychologist, psychiatrist
or even a second year psych major, or just ask yourself
about your own experience as a blamer. When the harder
road is the one that requires personal, mental, physical,
emotional and spiritual responsibility, underdeveloped or
pain-stricken human beings sometimes falter for a time
until they see and then rise above the pattern.

We have all blamed, and that does include yours truly.

Gun-blamers who’ve suffered through a suicide, however,
are advised to dig deeper — if their goal is truly to
save lives.

RESPONSIBILITY

Responsibility means many things to many people. In
this context, the definition to which I refer is:
accountability.

John D. Rockefeller said,

“Every right requires a responsibility.”

When we as individuals within a free society exercise
our rights regarding firearms, we possess in equal
measure an accountability for the safe exercise of
these rights. We are free to make choices, and that
includes what others will see as “bad” choices or
“wrong” choices. One could argue that free will —
choice — is at the very root of human nature.

We choose. And we suffer the consequences of our
choices. And we bear the fruit of our choices, as well.
The road forks, and we pick our paths and walk to the
best of our abilities to the next fork in our road,
making choices all along the way.

Some people come to a fork in the road where they
perceive it to be a literal dead end. Suicide
is a choice. Someone, for whatever reason, says,
“goodbye,” and they leave. Be it pills, rope, slashed
wrists, tall buildings, reckless driving, alcohol or
drugs, or by gun, a free will choice is engaged, and
off they go. They “infringe” — to the extreme — their
own right to life, by choice.

Fundamental to the healing that takes place in a
healthy grieving process after losing a loved one
to suicide is the coming to terms with the painful
realization that, in my case, for example, “my little
brother wanted to die so much, he actually went and
offed himself.” You wanna talk about some pain? I’ve
been through loads of the stuff in my life, but that
one was like trying to tackle the entire front line of
the Dallas Cowboys with both hands tied behind my back.
Took me at least a year to even comprehend the level of
acceptance required to swallow that pill, and three or
four more before I was done crying.

I share this with you to convey the depth and breadth
of the situation you’re dealing with when you are
dealing with a gun blamer who wants to ban all guns
because little Jimmy stuck a shotgun in his mouth. If
you are an anti-gun person who lost someone to suicide,

I share this with you because:

I’m living proof that you can pull out of the hole
you’re in that currently has you working to deny
little old ladies the right to carry guns to defend
their own waning lives against four big guys with
butcher knives and rape and murder on their minds.
That’s a dark, nasty, selfish place to try to work
out your pain. And you’re better than that.

I pray I may be of assistance to you in your quest
for understanding — and healing. But you’ll have to
listen and think for yourself, and that is what I ask
you humbly to do.

MY LITTLE BROTHER PULLED THE TRIGGER.
THE GUN DID NOT FIRE ITSELF.

What I finally had no other choice but to simply
accept was that Michael pulled the trigger. My dear
brother — loved by many and with whom I’d invested
countless hours — took his own life. He did it. The
gun was simply the vehicle; that is all.

What I came to realize — through emotional trial
and error — was that my unwillingness to accept
and deal with that painful fact was what “pushed me”
to seek other things to blame. I was, for a time and
understandably, being immature and irrational under
the weight of losing my little brother.

And, though I didn’t go to the extreme now exhibited
by many anti-self-defense/anti-gun people who are
calling for restrictions and in some cases complete
usurpations of other citizens’ God-given,
constitution-recognized right to self-defense and
liberty-defense, I can certainly speak from a place
of authority about what they are doing and why. I
walked a thousand miles in their mocassins.

People who’ve lost someone to suicide with a gun
and now work to strip other citizens of their rights
don’t want to admit that the gun didn’t do it to
him/her, because then they’d have to look at what
they are avoiding dealing with: guilt. I felt guilty
as Hell Itself, deep down inside where it hurt like
fire. What could I have done to change his mind?
Why didn’t I give him more of this or that? Why’d
my brother leave me? Was it so bad that he couldn’t
talk to me? Did I not leave an opening for him to
come to me? Etc. etc. ad painful nauseum. God knows
I know all those questions and a thousand more, and
I had to ask them, be with them, and move through it,
and so do you.

But not at the expense of the right of a little
old granny who doesn’t want her last breath to be
mixed with the sweat of a violent ex-convict the
government let out of jail a few years too soon.

WHY DO PEOPLE WHO LOSE SOMEONE TO
SUICIDE SEEK TO RESTRICT THE GUNS
OWNED BY OTHER PEOPLE?

Following are a few excuses being used by suicide
survivors who now call for gun restrictions and
gun bans, along with my observations:

“Make Their Death Count for Something”

This one is very common indeed. You can click to
testimonials of anti-rights websites and find this
one in plenitude.

“I just had to do something productive so Jane’s
death wasn’t in vain,” says one well-meaning woman.

Another tells us, “I want my husband’s passing to
serve as a beacon of life to keep guns out of the
hands of people who are prone to depression.”

The list of “make their death count for something”
justifications for stripping the very right that
created our nation and keeps us free is endless.

But when a gun control promoter finally wakes up,
he or she will realize that what “Jane’s” death is
counting for is the production of more crime, more
rape, more murder, less freedom, more fear, more
suffering, more heartache and agony, and everything
else bad that comes with decreased access to firearms
by lawful people — and it is not going to reduce
total suicide numbers.

Is that really what you want your husband’s passing
away to count for, ma’am? Would your husband really
want you to make sure a little old lady much like his
own mother is easier to rape?

“Easy access is the cause.”

This is one of the two loudest arguments in the
“control guns because of suicide” conversation.
You don’t have to look far to find someone who
lost a loved one to suicide blaming easy access to
guns.

“If guns weren’t so prevalent in our society, my
son would still be here,” says one very vociferous,
grieving mother whose son shot himself in the family
garage.

She didn’t mention if it was her own gun to which she
provided access, nor did she tell us if she watched
for warning signs, but I can tell you from experience
that warning signs are not blinking neon, and the fact
is that some kids are going to kill themselves no matter
what they use.

Japan is a good example of child suicide. Unless you
are a government agent or a member of the crime
syndicate, in Japan, you don’t have access to a gun.
So, not long ago, we saw a report of a junior high
student hurling himself to his death off of a third
floor balcony — during lunchtime at school. I don’t
think his parents are calling for the banning of
balconies.

Their society, like ours and many others, hasn’t figured
out how to create an environment where everyone is happy.

To my knowledge, no society ever has.

The biggest problem with embarking on a “reduce gun
access” crusade is that, in reducing access to guns to
prevent the suicidal from gaining access, you’re also
reducing access to guns for self-defense, family-defense
and liberty-defense for the other 99.9% of us, and that
just isn’t a very nice thing to do. In fact, when it
comes to reducing access such that little old granny
can’t get one and must therefore submit to a
knife-wielding rapist, it’s downright ruthless — all
in the name of working out your own issues.

I know it hurts, but do you really want to hurt more
people in your own measured moves to do what you think
is right — when it isn’t?

“We’ve got to do something to stop suicides.”

“I just had to do something.”

This one is as common as lying politicians. That vague
little statement has come up in numerous interviews
I’ve done with anti-gun people who’ve lost someone to
a bullet — especially with suicide survivors — so
many times I lost count long ago. And the “something”
anti-gun voters and/or activists choose is that
“something” that makes it easier for criminals to prey
on people.

When you take a gun away from a frail woman and put
her up against a large, strong man, without a weapon
or some serious training, she’s going to lose every
time. So your “something” you’re doing is something,
indeed, isn’t it? Rational, logical people find that
“something” is wrong when it strips a grandmother of
her right to stop a murderer who wants her gold teeth.

(That happened to a little old lady down the street
from my own grandmother, and he raped her and ran over
her 89-year-old body with her own car before he took
her gold teeth, too. Houston, Texas, in The Heights
area, several years ago, look it up.)

Guns hold self-defense empowerment for the grannies
of the world, and your loved one choosing to step out
of life prematurely is not a valid excuse for taking
away that self-defense empowerment while you “do
something.” I implore you to seek higher moral ground.

If you really want to “do something,” heal your own
pain without inflicting more unnecessary pain and
loss of life on other people’s families, please.

“Suicide with guns is much more effective.”

This one has been getting more airplay in the
anti-rights circles lately, and it is considered
by some to be the most effective argument in the
“control guns because of suicide” conversation —
so I will give it some extra, graphic time.

I had one local anti-self-defense/anti-rights leader
tell me this one to my face recently. When I attempted
to explain that people who choose a gun know this in
advance and that is WHY they choose a gun, I was met
with the closed mind now typical of the truly
one-minded rights violators. That half-hearted
attempts at suicides are just that — attempts,
not convicted commitments — was a fact she refused
to discuss, as many do.

But let’s deal with it here, since your mind is
more open than hers was.

First, imagine for a moment — hypothetically,
please — that you wanted to kill yourself. And that
you were really committed to seeing it through. And
that you wanted it to be fast — instant if
possible — and relatively painless. What would
you choose?

Unless you are not afraid of heights and falling –
and most of us are — your most intelligent choice
would most likely be a gun. (Buckshot through a
shotgun, to the head in one of three areas, to be
specific.)

With Chemicals

Pills can make you sick as a dog but not kill you,
and if you have to get your stomach pumped, you will
know the meaning of Living Hell, I’m told. I have
talked to two people who had their stomachs pumped;
it’s a memorable experience. With pills there is
also the chance of being found in your stupor and
rushed to the hospital, and if you really wanted to
leave, this would be a nuisance to your planned
journey.

You don’t have to trust me on that; call your local
hospital and ask how many stomachs they pump every
year. Then, consult your local psychologist about
suicide and you will find that people who use
less-effective means are usually crying out for
attention, not a face to face meeting with God.

Razor Blades

A razor blade across your wrist isn’t just a little
sting; it hurts. And unless you make a very deep cut,
you will bleed quite a bit but very possibly not die.

I will share an intimate part of my own experience
with my brother by telling you that he attempted
suicide two years earlier — with a razor blade.
He bled all over his bed and into a cooler, wrote
“I love you” in his own blood and laid there and
suffered for hours. When morning came, before we
were all up, he left the house and went and hid in
bushes down the street, supposedly to wait to die.

But he didn’t cut deep enough, and he didn’t really
want to die; he walked home with a pale green hue
to his skin to get medical and emotional help. We
most certainly did consult professionals, and he
told us himself that it was an attempt to get
attention — not a commitment to die. (It would
take a small book to relay to you what we went
through for two years before he truly chose to go.)

Jumpers

I don’t mind heights too much. I’ve jumped out of
airplanes at 12,500 feet, scaled mountains without
ropes over areas where, had I fallen, I’d not have
hit anything but air for more than 1,000 feet.

But most people would wet their pants looking out
over a ledge, let alone have the gumption to do it.
Jumping off of a tall building is significantly more
effective than pills or razor blades, but the fear of
heights and especially the fear of falling is quite a
deterrent — unless someone is really, really
committed to dying.

Like gun suicides, leaps to death are done by the
committed, not the attention-seekers, but this method
has its shortcomings that include the inconvenience
of having to find the “appropriate” jumping point and
getting up the nerve to face a fear that some experts
say is greater than the fear of dying itself.

By Rope

Hanging oneself is also not a fun thing to do, nor
a particularly easy one, for most people. I did know
one person who hung himself. Though we were not
particularly close, our mutual friends shared many
details in hopes I could somehow shed light on the
situation. Those details included pictures.

One thing that was clear about the images was that
he knew how to tie knots. Most people don’t. He also
had the sense to use a rope strong enough not only
to hold his weight but take a fall of a few feet. And
he was serious about doing the job, not just seeking
attention. Judging by the fact that he hung himself in
his backyard from his dad’s favorite tree and left a
very mean and nasty note, and judging by the fact
that he planned his departure such that a specific
family member would find him, it also seemed as
though he wanted to hurt his family.

Let’s just say, for the sake of the “rope conversation,”
that most people don’t like their air supply being cut
off, and unless you do it such that you take a slight
fall onto the rope and snap your neck, you will be
dangling breathless, suffocating a bit before you
are gone. Common sense says that unless done in a
very specific way it will not be instant, and it can
hurt if you don’t know what you’re doing, in more ways
than one.

Other Methods

Then there are people, small percentages, that throw
themselves in front of cars, busses and trains. That
isn’t a very nice thing to do to the driver, and
surviving as a paraplegic isn’t a fun way to view a
future in a life you want to leave. Effective, yes. But
likely painful, certainly messy, and it involves dragging
other people into your choice to go.

Then there are carbon-monoxide suicides. It’s a very
nasty way to die, but a very effective one if you don’t
mind being asphyxiated to death complete with choking
and gasping before you “fall asleep” — and being found
with green skin and purple rings around your eyes. And
the process of locking yourself in a garage or running a
hose into your enclosed vehicle is not only a logistical
issue, it isn’t possible for people who generally spend
time in close proximity to one another.

The Most Effective Way

So we come back to guns. Guns are the most effective
means of self defense. They are also arguably the most
effective means to cut your soul/spirit from your body.

I will use my brother’s legacy as an example. His second
attempt was not intended to be an attempt at all; he used
one of the most effective ways there is to kill yourself:
a shotgun to his medulla oblongata. (The only way he could
have increased the effectiveness would have been to use
buckshot rather than 6 shot.) His body may have had one
or two motor functions take place over the next 30 seconds
after he pulled the trigger, but his central nervous system
was done, and he was gone. Instantly.

And you can believe he didn’t feel a thing but for about
1/25th of one second, if that.

Our mutual close friend who left a week later also used a
shotgun, but to his heart. While more likely to yield pain
for three or four more seconds, suffice it to say that his
central nervous system and all motor functions were
effectively cut off, permanently. He wanted to die, he
said so in plain English in his note to us, and that was
that.

The deaths of my two loved ones was instant and
permanent, as they wished.

Another facet of using a gun to commit suicide is
portability. Our family was fortunate enough to have
had my brother drive some 150 or so miles away from the
house and pull over at a lovely roadside rest area to
make his exit. He locked the car, put the keys in his
pocket, laid down, goodbye — sparing us images to live
with for the rest of our lives. It is not uncommon for
people to travel away from their families to leave this
world, and a gun makes that choice easier to facilitate.
You can take it just about anywhere.

So when you say “guns are more effective as a suicide
method” or “the completion ratio with guns is much
higher,” you are correct. They are usually instant,
they are portable, and if someone knows what they are
doing, pain should be minimal or nonexistent. There is
no chance of someone finding you two hours into your 6
hour departure, and the chances of failing are very
slim — if you know your gun and your physiology.
Quite the effective suicide weapon.

But to pickle the anti-gunner’s cucumber: People who
choose a gun, point it at the the vital areas of their
body and pull the trigger know this, and they don’t want
to be here any more. I challenge you to finish this
article to find out just how wrong you are about trying
to take away the rights of old women and young, nursing
mothers because those people quit life.

I ALMOST GOT PULLED INTO
THE GRANDMA RIGHT-STRIPPER.

For a time, after my own brother chose to leave this world,
I found myself shunning guns. I owned several firearms at
the time, and Michael and I used to hunt together — but I
didn’t want much to do with guns for a while. I sold those
I owned, quit providing my food from the fields altogether,
quit shooting and stayed far away from guns for a couple of
years.

Though I never did go to any such place as to call for the
infringing on other people’s rights, had there been an
anti-rights propaganda machine standing by to sweep
me into its Red March, who knows? I might have lost it. It
is unlikely I’d have worked to strip people of their rights
as my parents raised me better than that, but the
anti-gun/anti-self-defense propaganda machine is really
good at twisting facts, figures, numbers and emotions to
suit their socialist agenda. When caught off guard and in
emotional turmoil, even the best person can fall. I didn’t,
Thank God.

Fortunately, I had a real life experience that led me to
understand the importance of guns in our society and in my
own life. I made a trip to Los Angeles, by car, and
realized quickly, at a roadside rest area, just how dangerous
some areas of our inner cities can be. Without belaboring the
experience, suffice it to say that being among 20 or 30
gang-bangers who have knives and clubs and mean looks
on their faces can have quite an effect on a person.

I “repacked”.

And I have kept a self-defense firearm handy ever since.
I refuse to be a victim; I am a self-determinant human
being. Unlike my brother, I choose to live. That is my
choice, my life is important to me, and I take my commitment
to stay alive and well very seriously — seriously enough to
stop another in his tracks if he picks me as his mark and
foolishly attempts to bring me or those around me any harm.

While suicide is a truly baffling and deeply painful
ordeal, mental rigor is still very much required in
order to accurately and intelligently address the issue
of preventable and unjustified violence. Falling into the
trap of ignoring reason and logic – simply because your
friend or relative chose to quit life – is a disservice
to the people you loved and lost, and an effrontery to
the very freedom of our nation and her fair citizens.
The gun-owning pregnant mothers of the world didn’t shoot
your loved one, and it’s not right to make them submit to
armed thugs and suffer accordingly just because you suffer.

For me to use Michael’s death to push for the infringing
upon the natural right of self-defense (gun control)
would not only be wrongful abuse of free people’s rights,
doing so would desecrate my brother’s grave. He pulled the
trigger. That was his choice, not mine — and certainly not
the fault or responsibility of the millions of lawful, decent
gun owners in our country.

Asking someone’s daughter to die at the hand of a
raping and murdering thug by removing her means of
stopping him from assaulting her simply because I can’t
find a better way to resolve my own anguish would be
like killing someone else’s cat because my cat died.
It’s that insane.

FACTS, STATISTICS AND STUDIES

Maybe some facts will help you get logical about
this situation. Sometimes, after losing someone we
love with all our hearts, so many emotions run so wildly
and deeply, turning the lights on in our rational minds
is an exceptionally productive exercise.

Try some of these on for size…

Real Numbers and Common Sense

According to the Center for Disease Control (who
I have no reason to believe any more than I believe
any federal government agency, but I am willing to use
their statistics because they are accepted widely),

“In the United States, there were 32,436 gun deaths
in 1997. Of these: 41.7% (13,522) were homicides/legal
intervention [killed by law enforcement]; 1.1% (367)
were of undetermined intent; 54.2% (17,566) were
suicides; and 3.0% (981) were unintentional.” (source)

Taking the commonly used number of gun owners of
83,000,000 and dividing it by the number of suicides in
the above year, we find that only 1 in every 4,727 gun
owners committed suicide that year in America. Keeping
in mind that they all did it by choice, and considering
that the other 82,982,434 gun owners had nothing at all
to do with that choice, can you understand how it’s not
very balanced or even sane to ask them to bear the
responsibilities and burdens of those dead people’s
choices?

Punishing 4,727 people for the actions of 1 person
who made a choice you don’t agree with is not only
irrational, it is bizarre. And, while I’m sure those
4,727 innocent and
not-connected-to-the-source-of-your-pain people
would send you love and prayers for your full and
easy healing, I trust you can understand, as well,
why they’d not appreciate bearing the burden of laws
brought about by someone who chose to quit life.

Asking those 1,701 gun owners to face life under the
thumb of your proposed grandma-infringing,
access-stripping laws because of a choice one person
made takes quite a bit of gall and insensitivity —
and selfishness. Stand up, rise up to the sheer
logic of what I just said, and be courageous enough
to find that it is true with a capital T. Why?

They’ll Do It Anyway

Then you might look to the fact that people who
are committed to dying are going to go through
with it, whether they have a gun or not. Among
many studies, Gary Kleck’s Targeting Guns: Firearms
and Their Control (p 285, Walter de Gruyter, Inc.,
New York, 1997), offers the following:

The full body of relevant studies indicates that
firearm availability measures are significantly and
positively associated with rates of firearm suicide,
but have no significant association with rates of
total suicide.

Of thirteen studies, nine found a significant
association between gun levels and rates of gun
suicide, but only one found a significant association
between gun levels and rates of total suicides. The
only study to find a measure of “gun availability”
significantly associated with total suicide…used
a measure of gun availability known to be invalid.

This pattern of results supports the view that where
guns are less common, there is complete substitution
of other methods of suicide, and that, while gun levels
influence the choice of suicide method, they have no
effect on the number of people who die in suicides.

If someone is going to kill him or herself anyway, why
does it make sense to make an arthritic old man easier
to accost by removing his right and means to defend himself
with the same measure of effectiveness used by criminals?
Unless you are going to ban all death-producing pills, all
tall buildings, all knives or other wrist-slashing devices,
all access to enclosed places where car exhaust can be
accumulated…you’ll not be stopping suicide with laws.

If you do see your anti-self-defense crusade being carried
to that unfathomable extreme, please include rocks, beer
bottles, pool cues, axe handles, shovels, pencils, and any
other hard or sharp objects to legislate your “safe
society.” Then explain why gun-banned Britain has a violent
crime rate with weapons other than guns that surpasses that
of the United States as reported by the stridently anti-gun
Dan Rather on CBS News. And I quote:

“The UK has a crime problem and, believe it or not,
except for murder, theirs is worse than ours.
~~ Dan Rather, CBS Special Report, July, 2000

The resolution to suicide is psychological, emotional
and spiritual, not legislative.

Other Countries as Clear Examples

Japan’s example destroys the “guns and/or their
availability cause suicide” myth. In Japan, less than 1%
of the households have a gun, but total suicide is higher
than in the United States where 25-50% of the households
have a gun. If guns and/or their presence in our society
are causal in those unfortunate and painful losses, how
can you explain Japan and still hold your rationale? I
truly want to hear your answer.
[email protected]

And if you compare suicide rates and suicide-by-gun
rates in various countries alongside those of the United
States, an even more obvious reality emerges: people
kill themselves at rates, in some countries, significantly
higher per capita than here in America — including in
places where gun ownership is so strictly prohibited you
will go straight to jail (or the morgue) for having one.
In other words, less guns in those societies but more people
per capita dying of suicide deflates the “guns and/or their
availability cause suicide” myth even further. No, actually,
it annihilates it.

Iain Murry said a mouthful when he said:

“It is safe to say that buying a gun does not mean
that you’re more likely to go from being content to
being suicidal.”

Then we could look at, for another example, Danish
suicides. In “Without Guns Do People Kill People?”
75 Amer. J. Pub. Health 587 (1985) (comparing U.S.
and Danish murder), we find the following telling
description of how numbers are used against American
gun owners and ownership itself, and how the use of
suicide numbers to attempt to bolster an illogical
anti-gun-ownership stance:

“Anti-gun sages have seized on a new device so they
do not have to deal with embarrassing facts. They
conceal declining American homicides (particularly
gun homicides) by combining suicide and murder
statistics, producing an “Intentional Homicide” rate
that they then claim to be “caused” by widespread
gun ownership.

“Yet these same anti-gun academics
continue to compare the American murder rate (alone)
to the murder rates of specially selected foreign
countries–without mentioning that virtually every
country they select to compare has an enormously
higher suicide rate than the United States.

“For instance, Prof. Baker, the originator of
the combined homicide-suicide approach, compares
American and Danish murder rates, placing great
emphasis on the fact that the American rate is
higher by about 7 per 100,000 population. Yet
Baker somehow forgets to mention that making the
same comparison of suicide rates would show the
Danish have 16.5 more deaths per 100,000 than the
Americans. Nor, of course, does Baker mention that
when suicide and murder figures are combined, the
Danish death rate per 100,000 is almost 50 percent
higher than the American.”

To synopsize the point immediately above, suicide
statistics are used against American gun ownership in
a double standard. “Don’t count other countries’ suicides
in their death-by-gun rates, but count them in ours.”
This is one of dozens of methods socialists bent on gun
restrictions and gun banning use to twist facts and figures
to make people formulate flawed opinions — and it is
insulting to the intelligence of the American people. And
the revelations that come from looking even deeper reveal
not only insult, but sheer and arrogant impudence.

Before you continue to support gun restrictions or gun
bans in your quest to “do something” about suicide, you
are urged to read the above book, where you will find a
host of facts your local gun blamer won’t tell you,
including the following:

“Of 18 nations for which figures were available, the
United States ranks only eleventh in intentional homicide.
The U.S. combined homicide and suicide rate is less than
half the suicide rate alone in gun-banning Hungary and
less than one-third the suicide rate alone of gun-banning
Rumania. New Zealand ranks sixteenth despite a rate of gun
ownership that far exceeds the U.S. rate. The lowest rate
on the table is for Israel, a country that actually
encourages and requires almost universal gun ownership.”
(p.42)

In other words, I’ll put it this way:

We have countries with low gun ownership and unusually
high suicide rates, and we have countries with high gun
ownership and unusually low suicide rates. Perhaps
suicide-suffering and/or suicide-exploiting gun
controllers should find alternative roads to their
socialist ends; this one seems to be closed.

I’ll close our Fact-based Reality Check with a quote from
“All The Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in
England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in America”
by Joseph E. Olson and David B. Kopel:

In 1903, Parliament enacted a gun control law that
appeared eminently reasonable. The Pistols Act of 1903
forbade pistol sales to minors and felons and dictated
that sales be made only to buyers with a gun license.
The license itself could be obtained at the post office,
the only requirement being payment of a fee. People who
intended to keep the pistol solely in their house did
not even need to get the postal license.

The Pistols Act attracted only slight opposition, and
passed easily. The law had no discernible statistical
effect on crime or accidents. Firearms suicides did
fall, but the decline was more than matched by an
increase in suicide by poisons and knives.

A rational, sane, mentally-capable person using suicide
to call for restrictions on guns and their lawful owners
must be ignorant of these facts in order to justify their
calls. With the above information, anyone who still says
reducing access to guns will reduce suicides is a liar —
a liar who cares more about a personal political agenda
than about the rights of innocent citizens to protect
themselves.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Not only is the use of suicides in addressing the issue
of violence an unfair and unrealistic tactic, it is a
blatant disregard for the true need to reduce preventable
deaths and injuries, by gun or any other means, and is an
irrational and emotionally immature place from which to
“deal with” losing a loved one.

Furthermore, punishing 4,727 people for each unhappy
member of our society who chose to stop exercising his
or her right to life is not only rude and irresponsible,
when it costs women their sexual dignity or their very
lives and when it costs families their precious loved
ones, it is socially unacceptable to the point of being
criminal.

There are painful things that happen in life, and suicide
is right up there at the pinnacle of agony thresholds. I
know; I’ve been through it. But killing other people by
stripping them of the means to stop murderous attackers
in order to “feel like you’re doing something” is
wrongheaded, self-centered and immoral at its very core.
Perhaps a survivor of suicide caught up in the
anti-self-defense/anti-rights crusade would best serve
our society by first understanding a basic and
self-evident statement from a Justice Casey Percell:

“It is not the responsibility of the government or the
legal system to protect a citizen from himself.”

And to that I add,

Were we to delve rationally into suicide and the gun
issue, we would necessarily ask the following question:

Is it morally or ethically sound to punish the lawful
living for the acts of those who disobeyed the ban on
suicide and therefore criminally misused a gun to do
themselves in?

Blaming a gun is a simple scapegoat during an emotionally
trying healing process, but as I believe I have shown,
attacking guns and self-defense/liberty-defense rights is
not a reasonable answer, nor a valid one. I have yet to hear
someone blame a razor blade or a rope for their loved one’s
death. And I don’t think the families of suicide “victims”
who chose a rope, pills, a sharp object or a long fall really
cared what method they used; the result was still the same.
If my brother had jumped off of a tall building, he would not
be any less dead.

Guns are a politically-correct target, not an sensible one.

If I could offer a gentle word of wisdom from experience
to a grieving person who is healing the pain of suicide, I
would say this:

I’m with you in your pain. I know it hurts very deeply. I
also know that your pain will lessen and then one day be
gone. You can do it. You can and will heal.

And while you are healing, please respect the rights of
little old ladies and young new mothers to defend their
own precious lives and dignities. They choose to stay here
on this Earth until their natural departure time arrives.
Asking them to submit to death prematurely at the hands of
a bad person by taking their means of self-defense away is
only inviting their own families and loved ones to suffer
the pain of loss that you now suffer. Please, in respect for
those of us who choose to live, stop supporting gun control
– and study this issue objectively.

Angel Shamaya is the Founder and Executive Director of
KeepAndBearArms.com, an internet-based grassroots
organization whose purpose revolves around making sure
the right of the people to keep and bear arms is returned in
full to every American. For more information about the
organization, visit http://www.KeepAndBearArms.com.

If you like what you see, memberships are welcome and
greatly appreciated:
http://www.KeepAndBearArms.com/custaccount

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Recommended Reading as footnotes to this article
are available at http://www.KeepAndBearArms.com/Suicide1