In the American Firearms Debate, Suicides are Invisible
The victim of a gun is very often its owner. We ignore this at our own peril
I begin this article with a story that some readers may find disturbing, but it gives context to this issue.
This is the story of three young men — I’ll call them B, D and L — from a small rural Midwestern town. They’re all athletes who know each other from various high school teams. They are also unified by a love of “partying,” which most of you will recognize as a euphemism for drinking.
In fact, on this particular Saturday night, the three of them are at B’s house getting hammered. It’s not an unusual pastime where I’m from — find a friend whose parents are out for the evening, sit in their basement and drink whatever’s available until time becomes blurry.
This particular night, though, they go a little overboard. D passes out and becomes completely unresponsive. To his friends, he appears dead. Despite their panic, B and L manage to summon an ambulance. Sometime after that, B — who sincerely believes that he has watched his friend die — gets his father’s handgun and shoots himself.
I didn’t know B all that well — our circles simply didn’t intersect. Even so, I can tell you that he did not fit the general understanding of a suicidal person. He was not riven by tragedy or savaged by life until he couldn’t take it anymore. No, he was simply a teenager who was drunk and armed, and it was a lethal combination.
This is something we rarely discuss in society, even in the kind of political circles where gun control is a major issue. The focus is always on homicides — the more dramatic, the better. Suicides just don’t rate in the discussion. But when we ignore gun suicides, we blot out some 23,000 deaths per year.
One of them was my classmate. Make no mistake: If he didn’t have access to a loaded, unsecured firearm, he would be alive today. He’s not the only one.
I opened with this story in part to preempt the inevitable response: You can’t count suicides as gun deaths, those people would have found another way. This simply isn’t true, and while this was obvious in the above case, it’s true more generally. Half of all suicides in the United States are by firearm, and that’s not mere happenstance.
Americans have a perversely romantic view of suicide, which we view as some sort of splendid and awful tragedy rather than what it is. In the popular imagination, suicide is a choice made after many anguished nights. There is always a suicide note (uncommon in real life) that is darkly beautiful in its composition and the fated party always has his affairs prepared for the grieving parties left behind.
In reality, suicide is inherently impulsive. There are many people who, at one time or another, wish for death but don’t seek it out. Those who go through with it are those who have made a decision in the moment that they can’t tolerate any more time on Earth.
As with any social ill, there isn’t any single risk factor for suicide. Hack pundits will often pontificate about the subject, naming one specific cause that conveniently lines up with everything they’ve believed about the world since they started college. In reality, the factors are many. One starts with the big factors of age and sex (young males are at the greatest risk) and then proceeds through dozens of other factors with varying degrees of weight.
If you want to, you can divide those risk factors into two big groups that relate to that concept of impulsivity. First are factors that inhibit one’s ability to control impulses. This might include substance abuse (especially alcohol), mental illness and various factors in one’s personal background. Second are factors that empower one’s impulses, which is to say the means to end one’s life.
This is one of those risk factors so obvious that people tend to overlook it. There are a lot of factors that put young people at risk for drug abuse, for example, but the biggest one might simply be access to drugs. If you don’t have the means to obtain cocaine, then your chances of becoming a cocaine addict are greatly diminished.
Here’s where the guns come back into play. If you don’t have the ability to end your own life, then it really doesn’t matter how much you want to die at any given moment. Firearms — especially handguns — provide a means to accomplish that which is both easy and effective.
I sometimes wonder how many people are alive today solely because they didn’t have a gun handy during a dark moment. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? Imagine writing such a large group out of the discussion.
But we will ignore this, I’m sure. The people who, just a few years ago, were raising hell over “deaths of despair” are going to sweep this under the rug. The rest of the country will ignore it — it’s simply not dramatic enough for an emotionally numb American audience. There will be a few articles on the subject; they’ll be briefly discussed and then set aside.
As for me, I won’t be brushing it off so quickly. I know many people who are walking around because they aren’t armed — and one who wasn’t so lucky.
