How many here have had gun violence affect their lives?

[Igel]

36. Yup.

Father, suicide. Background check didn't stop him, waiting period didn't stop him. As far as we know, he bought the gun for the purpose of suicide. Even banning semi-automatics wouldn't have stopped him. Single shot.

A couple of friends' father when I was a teen. He used a shotgun. Bolt action. He'd been a hunter for years, the gun had been in the family for a long time. Nothing suggested except going in an confiscating all firearms would have stopped this.

Kid at school. Family says accident, rumor said suicide. It was his father's. Don't know if it was semi-automatic or revolver. It matters not. One shot and the kid was dead. The gun had been legally purchased years before; the parents were surprised the kid knew where it was.


However ...

My mother was delusional and suffering from dementia. She made my father's life hell. He killed himself a week after getting the confirmation from the doctor. There were no support services for him, and from what he said the nurse that saw him was blunt and said his life would be hell. My father couldn't do the court thing to get her help, and himself help. But he left all the information he had to help me do it in the drawer in my parents' guest room, where I couldn't miss it When I filed for custody of my mother upon seeing the court application pulled a knife on me. I slept with the door locked and barricaded that night, and left the next morning before she got up. What she said seemed to imply that I was like my father and deserved the same. (She was ecstatic at his death. She all but admitted she'd threatened him with a knife.) Because she was delusional, when she said he had a gun nobody believed her. She also said he had a number of girlfriends, had never lived in their house, that the house had been built by her mother (and not in 1996), and that she'd commuted between Phoenix to Baltimore for work 5 days a week by plane starting in the 1950s.

My friends' father had lost his job. De-industrialization finally got to have men with 20 years' seniority laid off. They were behind in their mortgage. The mother had gotten a low-paying job in order to feed them. He gave up after suffering from depression for a while.

The kid at school had a folder. He was not stable, and while his family wasn't poor they really tried to put the best spin on things. For various reasons, the rumor seems more likely than the "accident" scenario. Even if it was an accident, it's likely the kid didn't just get out the gun to say "ooh". He was left unsupervised, and probably needed more interventions than required for merely getting accommodations at school so he could have an easier time passing.

What are the commonalities here?

All were suicides. All three were "middle class", all were white. All required just a single round, whether a slug or shot. all had some serious psychological issues to work through or get help with no way of getting help--sometimes it was a cultural barrier, sometimes financial, sometimes parental, sometimes simply not knowing the system. My father would have killed himself some other way, as would the twins' father. Men when they try to kill themselves tend to be serious and succeed fairly often. The kid probably is the most likely to still be alive in the absence of a gun, but he'd still have needed intervention.

Hi-mag limits reduce fat-tailed risks, but would make a just a dent in the death toll. Suicide does not require a 30-round clip.

Banning semi-automatic weapons wouldn't do too incredibly much for the suicide rate, which is more of a white than a black thing (yes, there's are a bunch of racial skews and some geographical ones in the gun-related death toll numbers--whites, esp. men, are more likely to die from suicide than blacks). Some countries in Europe with very harsh gun restrictions have higher suicide rates than in the US; some have lower. Anything more is probably just playing that ol' drinking game called "begging the question."

Banning big bad scary looking guns satisfy those into form over function, for those who see social reality as the ultimate reality, and lets them think they're doing something by imposing restrictions on others.