I'm suicidal and I think that if I owned a gun I would kill myself.
I'm not suicidal all the time, right now I'm not. But I am diagnosed Unipolar Depressive. That means that if I take my meds as prescribed, exercise, sleep right, avoid drugs and alcohol I'll be suicidally depressed less than I would be otherwise. But I will go through depressive episodes and during those episodes I will likely be suicidal.
Somehow it seems wrong to me that I am this way and yet I can just go buy a gun and there is no mechanism... no nanny state, if you will, that will stop me when I am at my least rational. Because people like me might benefit from a nanny state that looked at our history and said, you are a danger to yourself, maybe you don't need a gun.
My mom is a psychologist. She had a small collection of guns, none of which were hers. She would take them from suicidal - and on occasion, homicidal - patients. She never kept ammunition for any of them around but I used to take them out of her drawer and pretend to play Russian Roulette with them. Barrel in the mouth - you want to destroy the medulla oblongata not the cerebellum. No vegetation for me, thank you.
Mom still went to funerals for at least two patients I'm aware of. Both did it with a gun.
Had a really good friend in high school, Clay. He was an amazing guy, scholar, athlete, popular with everyone because he was such a good guy. One day he took his father's Smith and Wesson and blew his brains out. To this day I don't understand why. Clay did seem to have everything. Here I am, twenty two years later, missing him terribly as I write this.
But fuck it, you know, I'm not that important. Nor was Clay or a bunch of mental patients. People like us, well, really probably just natural selection at work, right? That's one suggestion I have gotten from a progressive RKBA fan. But I can concede the point. I don't think I'm worth all that much otherwise I would not have the problems I have.
What about these guys? Seems to happen somewhere every day:
Man kills girlfriend and daughter before killing self
Husband shoots wife and children before killing self
Wife and kids die in apparent murder-suicide
Maybe, just maybe, it's worth having some sort of discussion of the nanny state's role in regulating the ability to take a life so quickly, so effortlessly.
Nah, that's just stupid talk from some liberal nut, right?