Another forum's thread about suicide with a gun

The suicide rate in Japan is higher than the US, and they have very low gun ownership. Not surprisingly, they don't have many suicides using guns. A lot of people ride the trains there. People in Japan jump in front moving trains a lot more compared to the US.



One of my father's students killed himself by getting a tank of helium and putting a bag over his head. Perhaps a federal ban on plastic bags would have saved him. But I doubt that.

um... what kind of work do you do? might be chemicals in the air.

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Nah, nothing like that. We're are a manufacturing/distribution plant that deals with home accessories/furniture.

Other than firearms being somewhat effective to grossly effective for suicide, I'm not sure what to say here.

Your life is yours. You can choose to live or die. None of my beeswax if you decide to take your own life.

Comments???

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Messy. (How thoughtless to ask another to clean up the mess you left behind)

Unimaginative. (Tho how Vince Foster got his blood to flow uphill took some doing I imagine)

Not always effective (I might miss, as others have pointed out, and wouldn't that be just dandy to have people saying, "He couldn't even kill himself right. What a loser." Talk about being bummed out)

I think suicide should be legal... weather you are terminally ill or not. What they did to Kevorkian was a joke. If we want to pretend to have freedom in this country, and spread it liberally across the globe, should that not be a fundamental personal choice.

As for guns and suicide... it is really a matter of "pick your poison". One way or another, a determined individual will succeed.

If guns made a person more likely to kill him or herself I would have killed myself many times over starting a very long time ago. Guns all over the place, and a few are loaded. Just grab, point, bang. But it hasn't happened yet, so I disagree strongly with this anti argument.

All moral discussion of suicide aside, it's a misuse of the firearm and I wouldn't condone it absent a real emergency.

I found 4 pages of suicide when I searched YouTube. What are these people trying to glamorize?

Did you actally think I was

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... a troll? Yep, smells like one to me!

Back under your bridge...

Well if guns are gone, they will use knifes, cars, bridges ect. guns are just the smoothest way to go about it I suppose.

Hopelessjoe,

Last year my cousin's long-term girlfriend, Theresa Duncan, killed herself. She used pills and alcohol.

Several days later my cousin, Jeremy Blake, followed her. He walked out into the ocean and swam until he drowned.

Firearms had nothing to do with their deaths.

Firearms are tools. They can be used as well as miss used. Blaming the tool for the action of the user is like blaming the ocean for my cousin's death.

Sincerely,

Prof. A. Wickwire

Every year 20-30 people throw themselves off the Golden Gate bridge. The bridge authority has for years wanted to put a railing of some sort to prevent these suicides. I've always been against that for aesthetic reasons; it would change the look of that most beatuiful bridge. I'm not callous, just think those suicidal folk will find another way to die. Seems the same to me, as having a gun in the house, easier, but other ways are easy to find..

Suicide is a subject that I know something about...and it's always bad...no matter what the method or the means. Although it's a sad turn of events that leads a person to seek a permanent solution towhat is most often a temporary problem...I don't have a lot of sympathy for suicides except in the cases of terminal illness accompanied by high doses of pain or...those people who suffer such long-term and deep depression that they really see no light shining in the distance. Those are the truly sad cases.

Those who do through some misplaced desire for revenge or to hang a guilt trip on others? Sorry.

And, in case anybody feels like this is insensitive and crass...my own mother was a suicide, successful on her 2nd attempt. Her brother was also a suicide.

On the political side...Using a gun to off oneself does nothing to further our cause, but at the moment...I really don't think the self-killer is thinking about any of that.

Well something like 1 in every 100 people kill themselves so by that logic there should be many more THR members who have made that chioce.

In all honesty I would much rather off myself running a car in a garage or ODing on pills. But to me suicide is not an option for religious reasons.

One needs to be careful about applying statistics to self-selecting groups. While the statistic of 1 in every 100 people killing themselves (don't know if that statistic is true or not) might hold true for a random group of people, membership on THR is a self selecting group..not random. There are a lot of factors in ending up as a THR member that could reduce or increase the number.

Extrapolating statistics is a tricky business...

as always, just one man's opinion

migoi

Here's one of the problems with firearms as they relate to suicide - "Firearms are the most commonly used method of suicide among males (56.8%) (CDC 2005)."

http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/dvp/suicide/SuicideDataSheet.pdf

Regardless of what you think of suicide, this info can be (and probably has been) used by the antis as a reason to limit or restrict firearms ownership.

Suicide troubles me, but suicide with a gun troubles me more. When I think of suicide, I think of something I heard long ago. The degree of violence/mess of a suicide has a lot to do with how much pain the 'victim' wants to inflict on the 'survivors'.

You're dead in both cases, but there's a big difference in shock value to the survivors between an overdose and a shooting (or other arguably violent means).

I think the use of a gun is highly dependent on the situation and what type of suicide it is.

For people who are depressed, a carefully planned use of a gun would be very affective. But for people who commit suicide based on some form of sudden emotion (eg, the people who jumped out of the world trade center were probably normal, stable people looking for escape). In these cases guns don't seem to be very affective.

For example, there was an attempted suicide in my area where a man killed his friend over a petty argument. In light of the sudden emotion, he then tried to kill himself with a gun, (.22 rifle), but he did the old "under the chin" method seen in hollywood. So now he has a mangled face and he's going to prison.

Two of my best friends committed suicide. One (he was a member here) with a gun, the other with a box cutter. It makes very little difference either to the dead man or to the ones left behind. The dead are just as dead, the living just as hurt, either way.