Gun store in Wisconsin found liable.
I lost my brother to a gun suicide. You are a jerk. Hopefully a little more life experience will teach you something about compassion. But from what I am seeing here, you don’t seem to have made much progress so far.
@Vladenschlutte, some of your posts over the years have left me shaking my head, but that one just takes the cake.
When I was in college my oldest brother blew his brains out with a hunting rifle. He was drunk and depressed and did it with no concern for his beloved German shepherd, who was left alone with my brother’s dead body until a friend discovered what had happened several days later. I honestly believe it was an impulsive decision. Alcohol and guns are a disastrous combination.
I sincerely hope you never experience the loss of someone you love to suicide by gun or any other means. Most suicide survivors are grateful to have failed in their attempts. Sadly, guns are very good at killing at close range.
why only focus on the gun and not the alcohol?
how many deaths does alcohol cause?
Because you can’t take alcohol to a school and kill 20 first graders.
This as far as I can tell, means that what I said (or what you correctly deduced I meant) is true. That people who can’t kill themselves with a firearm will find a different way to do it. If the suicide rate is the same between gun owning and non-gun owning households what other conclusion can you come to?
Intparent, cosmic, and Lucie, I’m sorry for your loss, but I simply don’t understand how it is less of an emotional impact for someone to die by hanging themselves or jumping off a building than by a firearm.
This is a thread that was started in response to a shooting. With that in mind it makes a lot of sense to talk about guns.
Quit while you are behind, Vlad. Your comments are profoundly insensitive.
Apologies in advance to others that this might offend, but Vlad, are you on the spectrum? It might explain the social faux pas.
I have a kid on the spectrum, and wholly applaud your question.
Not as far as I know but when I’m talking with other people I don’t know and am unlikely to meet I’m attempting to use logic rather than emotion. Though I’m unsure what I’ve said that could be so offensive other mentioning suicide without treating it as some horrible act so maybe I am.
Alcohol is implicated in tons of deaths, but we do focus on alcohol deaths. We have DUI enforcement, we have 24/7 Sobriety programs for domestic violence offenders, we have strict rules about alcohol sales.
We can focus on two things.
But the overall suicide rate is NOT the same in gun-owning households and non-gun-owning households. It’s much bigger in gun-owning households, and the entire increase is suicide by gun.
You misunderstood what I said in a previous message, Vlad. I wrote, "If we ignore gun suicides, the suicide rate is about the same between people in gun-owning households and people not in gun-owning households. "
That is, the rate for suicides not by gun is about the same among people who have guns and people who don’t have guns. Then we have to add on the suicides by gun. But the rate of suicide by gun is much greater in gun-owning households. Therefore, the total suicide rate in gun-owning households is twice as big as the rate in non-gun-owning households.
You’re just wrong about that, Vlad. Not in every case, of course, but as it turns out, more often than not suicide is a highly impulsive act. According to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine:
http://www.businessinsider.com/many-suicides-are-based-on-an-impulsive-decision-2014-8
Suicide is also highly opportunistic. Before the 1970s, England had a suicide-by-coal-gas-oven problem. Everyone had a coal gas oven and it accounted for half of all British suicides. In the 70s, England converted to natural gas for environmental reasons. You’d expect that the suicide rate would remain roughly unchanged, wouldn’t you? Because if someone wants to commit suicide, they’ll find a way to do it. Nope. Once the coal gas was out of their homes, British suicide rates fell by 30% and have stayed there.
Here’s more evidence that suicide is impulsive and opportunistic. There was a study of 515 people who were prevented from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, spanning a 35-year period. Of those 515 people, 94 per cent were either still alive or had died from causes other than suicide. A mere 6 per cent were so hellbent on committing suicide that they eventually succeeded.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/217131
It’s not less of an emotional impact. But suicide is far less likely to happen if there isn’t a deadly weapon nearby.
Waiting for a sincere apology to those on this thread, and those just reading, whose lives have been touched by suicide. Hint: A sincere apology doesn’t contain the word “but.”
Vlad,
If you think gun suicides are the cleanest and don’t put others at risk, then logic hasn’t entered the building yet.
@Vladenschlutte, I can’t speak for others, but I don think my brother would have hanged himself or jumped off the roof of his house. He was too drunk to plan anything out–it was an IMPULSIVE ACT. It’s not that his taking his life by another means wouldn’t have been as devastating, but I don’t believe he would have killed himself if he hadn’t had a gun nearby.
These senseless tragedies happen with depressing regularity. Please read this article: http://articles.philly.com/2015-09-11/news/66400919_1_gun-ownership-prevent-gun-violence-national-suicide-prevention-week
Speaking of young men on the spectrum and guns, let’s bring this back to the discussion of mass shootings and the Roseburg, OR, shooter, who, along with his mother, are reported to be on the spectrum. Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting theory, which he goes into in great detail in this week’s New Yorker. He postulates that what’s going on in the case of many of these school shootings, based on sociologist Mark Granovetter’s progression model of riot behavior, is a “slow-motion, ever-evolving riot.” It’s a lengthy, rather depressing piece, and I’m not sure about the theory as applied in this situation, but it’s worth considering. However, it’s the history of one potential assassin, Minnesota high-schooler John LaDue (whose plans were thwarted by a suspicious neighbor), that is particularly scary for those who parent a kid on the spectrum.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence
It’s this “counterfeit deviance” that rang true to me:
This is a tidy summary of a symptom of our societal gun problem:
Guns don’t kill people, toddlers do.
Interesting that 90% of the gun-wielding toddlers are boys. It must surely result from innate gender differences in behavior, There doesn’t seem to be time to have everyone socialized into such a divide by age 3.
This thread has an intense focus on three things: suicides, accidents (toddler, child and adult), and mass shootings involving guns. Ironically, this focus highlights why more states are liberalizing gun laws and more law-abiding people are buying guns.
While this focus is warranted as areas to try and reduce numbers, the posters in favor of extreme limitations on guns seem to miss the main reason why they are essentially losing the argument - I do not mean on this thread; I mean the public argument, as more guns are bought and carried personally and are in homes for protection.
Now, why and how can this be, if these arguments about suicides, accidents, and mass shootings are supposedly so powerful and accurate? Policymakers should have no problem instituting controls to stop this “gun violence” epidemic. The answer is the control arguments are only valid if this were a zero sum situation, but it is not.
I have been in enough public policy meetings and debates where city and states boards are often paralyzed by the positives of gun ownership that they would have to account and take responsibility for if guns were severely restricted from what exists currently. The result is they balk.
The first not-so-simple question for towns, cities and states to answer is since 3 - 4,000 people per day use a gun to stop the commission of a crime against them and/or others, who picks up the responsibility and the costs for the subsequent increase in crime that must occur if these people were unarmed? Well, the fiscal answer is there is no money to expand police departments to the required levels, period. However, the real answer is politicians do not want the blame for the crime increase.
The second not-so-simple question is for the same 3 - 4,000 people daily above, a percentage who clearly save their own lives, why are their lives seemingly less important than those who commit suicide (who threaten no one but themselves) and those lost to accidents with guns? The answer is their lives are not any less important, as all humans have the right to defend their own lives. Thus, it is very difficult to convince policymakers to take away these people’s right to an effective self-defense that has already been proved to work. Even police tell policymakers that in 90%+ of all cases of defensive gun use, they (the police) could never get there in time to help or there was no way for them knowing a crime was even being committed, until alerted by the person who saved himself and reported the encounter.
The third not-so-simple question re mass shootings rears its head right up until the policymakers digest that there is an average of 12 such shootings a year that kill an average of 120 people annually - where, in the vast majority of cases, the person had mental issues. In contrast, the number of deaths by mass shootings annually is 10X less than the number killed with knives; is 5X less than number killed with hands (punching) and feet (kicking); and, is 3X less than is killed by hammers. Because these other methods of killing do not provide the direct self-defense positives that guns provide, it becomes difficult to explain the elimination of the one self-defense mechanism that actually has a tremendous proved upside to personal safety. e.g., 200,000 women alone use a gun to stop a crime against themselves annually.
The fourth not-so-simple question re mass shooting is since for every successful one, one or more are stopped by an armed civilian before the cops even arrive on the scene, then why eliminate the one known immediate private method proved effective in saving lives in mass shootings? It does become a bit of a quandary to say that making all the law-abiding unarmed makes everyone safer even though the mass shooter would not care about the law.
And finally, the fifth not-so-simple question is if homicides using guns is at such an epidemic, then: 1) why are homicides 50% lower today than in 1990? And, 2) why is this lower homicide rate, which continues to fall, occurring as gun ownership has accelerated in the same time period and is now at an all-time high? If guns in the hands of law-abiding people is such a problem, should not the homicide rate rise as more and more “gun nut” civilians own guns? In short, the data does not fit the call for limiting of CCPs or anything of the sort.
Specifically re suicides, the most effective way to reduce this number is for families of such known people to have the power to petition for their addition to the no-purchase list and also for these family members to voluntarily choose not to have guns in their houses or in their possession, ever.
I am not really debating here because everyone on this thread has his position. I am simply pointing out the basic issue is that for every victim presented on this thread who was / is harmed using a gun (suicides, accidents, mass shootings) there are many, many times more people who are unharmed or alive because of the defensive use of a gun. And that is the gun control advocates’ main problem - so many defensive gun use people exist (and there are more each day) that to tell them they were safer being unarmed falls on deaf ears. And like control advocates, they vote, but are the stronger, more numerous lobby, and increasing in number daily.