Firearms Access and Suicide Prevention

[JCN]

Right now insurance companies are denying and delaying all kinds of procedures and tests because they don't satisfy their narrow criteria of documentation even though the physician judgement warranted ordering it.

You could spin the data and say that delay prevented X number of procedural complications and Y number of unnecessary procedures.

But at what cost to the people who were delayed and had a negative outcome because of the delay?

More friction in preventing access to guns will likely reduce suicides.

Just like more friction in preventing access to medical care will reduce injuries from medical care....

[whomever]

"While I can easily see how most folks that support waiting period and red flag laws have no ulterior motive other than addressing firearms related suicides and homicides, others only see such beliefs as an attempt to infringe upon their rights."

Just an aside on how to get maximum benefit from minimum cost: some years ago a fellow went to a local range that rented guns and killed himself. The newspapers made it front page news for days, and ... copycats started doing the same thing. What's a range to do? They don't want that happening, but their business is renting guns.

So they adopted this policy: first time customers who wanted to rent a gun had to either A)come with a friend or B)show that they had a gun (and maybe C)have some evidence of firearms use ... CCW, etc, I forget). That was sufficient to put an end to the walk in suicides.

If people want a waiting period for suicide (or for that matter murder) prevention, as opposed to generally harassing gun owners, then they should be willing to have an exemption for people who already have access to a gun.

There is still the argument a delay might be dangerous to the non-gun owner who comes under some kind of unexpected threat, but at least you wouldn't have the silliness of telling a guy who has a safe full of guns he needs to wait 10 days so he won't do something impetuous with a gun.

(Heh ... was a member of a range that had an FFL and had lots of LEO members. This was when WA let people with carry licenses skip the waiting period. A just-out-of-the-academy officer shows up, in uniform, city issued gun on his belt ... "My FTO sent me here to buy a backup gun". He picks one out ... then gets told he has to come back to get it after the waiting period, since he didn't have a carry permit. Meanwhile the civilian types are showing their CPL and walking out with their purchases.)

[Glenn E. Meyer]

Then what are you going to do? Smart bridges?

Actually that is a major planning initiative. Google scholar bridge barriers and suicide and you will find many cases of putting in barriers to deter and it cuts down rate. Removal increases incidents at the bridges. Might those folks substitute another method, perhaps. It's debated.

However, the bridge example is not a good one for arguing against smart guns or locks.

This comes down to the core debate about gun possession. They are instruments of lethal force that can be misused. They are instruments of lethal force that can be used in self-defense, defense against tyranny and defense of the nation. How do you balance these? While you can spout an absolutist slogan about a divine right, the world doesn't work that way. Societal forces will decide.

What level of what controls will society adopt for the benefits vs. harms? The women, for example, who protect themselves vs. half of gun deaths being suicides. Not an easy debate for dichotomous solutions.

[WobblyPossum]

Since it sounds like most people who commit suicide by firearm do so with their own firearm, I only see two ways in which smart guns would decrease suicide rates. First, for the small amount of teenagers who kill themselves using their parents’ firearms, if the parents only owned smart guns the teenagers might not be able to commit suicide with them. Second, for people who impulsively buy a gun for the sole purpose of suicide, a smart gun would likely be much more expensive than a regular gun and that might prevent them from acquiring a gun for the purpose of suicide. Both of these scenarios basically rely on the assumption that all available guns would be smart guns. If the parents of a suicidal teenager also own a bunch of regular guns, the teenager could use one of the regular ones to kill themselves if they could gain access. Same for the suicidal adult looking to buy a gun for killing themselves. If regular guns are available, they’d buy a cheaper regular gun and use that.

It sounds like we wouldn’t get much benefit for doing something that could greatly infringe on our rights down the road.

Smart guns might make it harder for people to steal guns and use them for crime later although a cottage industry to hack the tech would develop.

[TAZ]

Clearly I should have paid more attention in my college communications class, because you (and some others) have misinterpreted/misread basically everything I wrote.

The blame is a 2 way street. We are all human beings and interpret things with the biases of our own experiences. Sometimes those biases make getting a message through harder than it should. I will be the first to admit that I have HUGE biases due to having spent my formative years under a communist regime as an ethnic minority whose grandparents dared to own land at one time. As such I take a harsh view for enabling more government controls over what I view as inalienable rights. Any rights, not just guns. Along this veins anything that inhibits rights, or poses a slipper slope for future erosion of rights damned well better have a good reason. According to the Google there were under 49,000 suicides in the USA in 2018. Estimates are that there were 328MM or so people in the USA at that time. That is .015% of the population (all suicides). Lest assume the stats that 50% of suicides are gun related are accurate That leaves 0.008% of the population that killed themselves with guns. That means that we are now talking about implementing nation wide policies to MAYBE prevent the actions of 0.008%. Policies that have an impact on the rights of all US nationals. That doesn't add up in my book. Especially since I do not believe that it will have much impact on the suicide rate in the nation.


Smart guns will be a HUGE minority of production and implementation. I sure as shit won't buy one. This alone makes them tits on a boar useless in preventing anything.
This lack of effect will drive more arguments for making normal guns more restricted (think NFA) or buy backs for exchanges or mandated conversion or ... all steps that limit rights for all for the sake of the 0.008% who may or may not do something else to kill themselves anyway.

Smart gun tech will drive prices up, making them less accessible/desirable for folks.
Smart gun tech will for the near and mid term be of questionable reliability. Bet you won't see any high value PSD's run them, ever.

Smart guns and suicide are smoke and mirrors for more government intervention.

You are 100% correct that we are going to be seeing more and more of this BS in our world, especially as the tech becomes more mainstream and maybe more feasible. Unfortunately, the gullibility of the nation seems to be getting worse, so I agree that we will see more and more implementation and regulations that point us in this direction. Doesn't mean that I have to agree with it or even like it. The government that promotes the killing of hundreds of thousands of babies each year doesn't give a crap about that 0.008% that kill themselves with guns. Its an excuse.

[SecondsCount]

.... The government that promotes the killing of hundreds of thousands of babies each year doesn't give a crap about that 0.008% that kill themselves with guns. Its an excuse.

If I could like a post 1000 times

[45dotACP]

That New Jersey was once trying to make all other guns illegal once smart guns were commercially available tells me all I need to know about what the leftists true intentions are with smart gun tech...and it sure as hell isn't about reducing suicides or accidental deaths.

That said, assuming it's not mandatory, I'd be interested in a product improved version.

Sent from my moto g(6) using Tapatalk

[Navin Johnson]

Remember it's not the government that enables killing hundreds of thousands of babies......

It's not the government that's going to mandate that the only guns you're allowed to have out of a safe are smart guns ....

It's the sick people that elect the government to do their dirty work for them

[BehindBlueI's]

I have a few thoughts on this.

On old suicide statistics - In years past, it was much easier forensically and politically to stage a murder as a suicide.

The flip side to that is many suicides were written up as accidents. Especially among cops.

[BehindBlueI's]

Original topic was found here: https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....=1#post1307685

Apologies to @Glenn E. Meyer for mucking up their thread in the first place.





The argument I was making is that widespread smart gun adoption is almost certainly going to make a measurable impact on suicide rates in the USA, due to the fact that the introduction of friction (as defined by economics). Most folks will claim that suicidal people will simply find alternate ways to kill themselves if denied access to firearms; my argument is that this has not been borne out by the data. In terms of suicide specifically, the UK phased out coal gas ovens during the 1960s; coal gas had a very high level of carbon monoxide in it, and the UK during the post-war period, before the phase out, roughly half the suicides were via coal gas. After the phase-out of coal gas for natural gas ovens, suicide rates still remained depressed (a third lower than it used to be), and studies have strongly suggested that this was due in largely to the phase out of coal gas, and not other interventions/changes that happened at the same time. Other studies concern bridges (a popular bridge for jumping that had suicide barriers added to it, while a nearby bridge that had always had a chest-high railing did not see a measurable increase in jumpers) and pesticides (phase out of lethal pesticides in various South Asian states) seem to carry the same impliciation

Friction in general is a powerful force, and closely related to nudges (I believe we had a thread about that relatively recently dealing with the state's responses to the pandemic). One of the most well-known of these is the opt-out 401k (where the employee is automatically enrolled, and must opt-out of the plan); studies showed that in an opt-in 401k system, employees enroll at about a 1/3rd rate, while in an opt-out 401k there was about 90% enrollment rate. This is an area of economics/sociology that has gotten a lot of attention over the past few decades.

The fundamental argument I'm making is that humans are not rational, and tend to be quite impulsive, and thus these small barriers that get thrown up can and will often have measurable changes in behavior overall. Thus, I strongly believe that widespread implementation of smart guns would in fact have a noticeable impact on suicide rates within the USA. This is not to say that I support such measures, as there are a number of other factors that play both into suicide rates and reasons for firearms ownership, but I would strongly disagree with the assertion that smart guns would not have a measurable impact on American suicide rates.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

I think we've read a lot of the same stuff.

From both academic sources and from just real life interventions, there is a subset who are dedicated enough they will kill themselves regardless. There's a very large subset that if you get them over the current hump will get past it and not attempt again. There's another subset who are not serious in the attempt, sometimes until they are and sometimes always just false starts. Nothing is 100%, but it will make a difference.