Torture numbers long enough and they will confess to what every you want them too. Montana has an intentional homicide rate of around 3.5. Only about 1/2 of those are committed with firearms. We do however have a high gun suicide rate. So we are "classified" as having a high "gun violence" rate.
About 2/3rd of gun deaths are suicides.
The anti gun argument is that a gun suicide is irreversible and someone who shoots themself will be dead, even if just doing it as a suicidal gesture. Thus their logic is that fewer of those people would successfully commit suicide if they didn’t have access to guns.
As a mental health counselor my opinion is that’s complete bull hockey. Folks shooting themselves in the head or chest with a gun are not making a suicidal gesture - they intend to kill themselves and quite frankly I’d prefer they do it that way than do it in a head on collision with an oncoming car.
I’ll also argue that guns are not the leading cause of suicidal gestures gone wrong. For example a distraught teenager ODs on Tylenol and then wakes up in the ICU with her loving family around and declares she just wanted attention. Unfortunately, she also caused complete liver failure and now needs a transplant or she’s going to die - and she isn’t going to get that transplant in time.
I’ll argue that one of the reasons she didn’t use a gun was she wasn’t serious. Women also choose drugs as a means of suicide at a ratio of about 2-1 over males. Men care a lot less about how they’ll look at the funeral.
Acetaminophen is the drug of choice for teen suicide and rates of suicide are up about 34% since 2020. But there isn’t much talk about that and no talk at all about banning it, or putting more restrictions on it.
But when gun suicides go up people blame the guns and pretend that if we just ban guns suicides will go down.
The problem is suicides go up when rates of despair go up. Instead of putting effort into gun bans it makes more sense to address why people kill themselves rather than how. When the economy goes south, you have more debt, more stress, less educational and employment opportunity, etc, and all those factors lead people to believe things are not going to get better. That’s was triggers plans and them actions to take their own lives.
Unfortunately mass shootings of the Las Vegas, Uvalde, Orlando, etc type are also deaths of despair as the shooter chooses suicide but in a way that uses a gun to give himself (almost always male, usually young) power over others and make a statement and achieve some attention and infamy as he checks out.
But it’s the availability of guns that blame for the rise in mass killings, not the failed social policy that causes a sharp rise in all forms of suicides.
But that kind of explanation is complicated and the solutions are also complicated.
Americans unfortunately like things kept simple, so they reject the complex, embrace the simple and then call anything that doesn’t fit their preferred narrative “fake news”.
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