Eric Boehlert at Media Matters reported today about a surging suicide rate in this country. And while the problem itself may get covered in the media, what goes unreported is how the proliferation of guns has contributed to it. Suicide by gun is particularly a problem for white men in rural areas,
Meanwhile, the NRA offers the false argument from inevitability, as if everyone who attempts to commit suicide eventually does succeed. They will even treat a gun owner's suicide as something of a virtue, self-reliance taken to an extreme. But as the suicide rate climbs, gun enthusiasts have a greater interest in suppressing this problem -- and the media seem to be giving them a pass.
So while the rate of suicide increases, making it a more common cause of death than a car accident, Media Matters rightly connects the problem to the easy access to guns in America.
The oversight continues a troubling media trend of news reports routinely failing to put U.S. gun violence in context and failing to give news consumers a proper understanding of the size and scope of the deadly epidemic. Self-inflicted gun deaths remain the cornerstone of suicides in America, accounting for 56 percent of male suicides. And the gun rate is increasing. You simply cannot discuss suicide in America without addressing the pivotal role firearms play. Unfortunately, in recent days lots of news organizations have tried to do just that.
But the focus of gun legislation has been background checks, and the media has played a part in the lack of attention to suicide, as Media Matters documents. They give examples from
NBC News offering just one reference to guns in their report on suicide, a
Wall Street Journal article that fails to even mention guns, and an
Associated Press article that barely acknowledges the role of guns in the rising suicide rate in America.
The gun enthusiast's arguments often revolve around dismissing gun suicide as a problem at all, and the NRA's piece on suicide bears this out.
It has long been the practice of anti-gun groups and elements of the media to lump firearm suicides, homicides and accidents--whose causes are separate and distinct, and must be in order to be addressed as such--in order to scare the public with alarming statistics. Anti-gun advocates, including members of the public health community, recently have taken to combining suicide and homicide figures in the U.S. This allows them to conceal the decline in U.S. homicide rates (and to exaggerate the so-called "societal costs" of gun ownership).
Media Matters points out that the CDC has suffered under a
17-year ban from doing research into gun violence, a ban recently reversed by one of President Obama's executive orders. But the CDC isn't the only organization capable of studying the issue, and so Media Matters cites the
American Journal of Epidemiology, the
Harvard School of Public Health, the
Journal of the American Medical Association, and the
University of California, all supporting the connection between guns in the home and suicide, supporting higher suicide rates when guns are available. Take the last one, for example, the University of California at Riverside.
With few exceptions, states with the highest rates of gun ownership -- for example, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Alabama, and West Virginia -- also tended to have the highest suicide rates.
When I think of gun violence, states like these don't come to mind -- and with good reason, as the media's failure in reporting this is clear. Occasionally they do manage some good reportage, as I found in this piece from the
Washington Post.
Where a person lives matters, too. Gun deaths in urban areas are much more likely to be homicides, while suicide is far and away the dominant form of gun death in rural areas. States with the most guns per capita, such as Montana and Wyoming, have the highest suicide rates; states with low gun ownership rates, such as Massachusetts and New York, have far fewer suicides per capita.
The chart may explain somewhat why gun homicide isn't a particular concern of white folks, perhaps. Although understanding why suicide hasn't become a concern for them seems called for. If it's a problem hitting them harder, why don't they care? Part of it is the
NRA mindset.
Some would suggest that the rate of suicide may indeed be higher among firearm owners than non-owners. Gun owners are notably self-reliant and exhibit a willingness to take definitive action when they believe it to be in their own self-interest. Such action may include ending their own life when the time is deemed appropriate. Such a hypothesis has been supported by Professor Gary Kleck in criticizing the 1992 study by Kellermann, et al. "The Presence and Accessibility of Firearms In the Homes of Adolescent Suicides."
This mindset finds a good example in the Washington Post article, where they quote a suicide hotline worker in Colorado, Eleanor Hamm. Here's someone who works in suicide prevention, who has nevertheless internalized the NRA's
argument from inevitability.
Hamm echoed the NRA position, saying that people without access to guns will kill themselves by other means. “It’s easy for the passion of the day to look at gun control,” she said. “It’s missing the point of mental health and what is really truly taking place.”
It's interesting to contemplate someone who says we can do better on mental health -- and yet who believes that someone lacking a gun will just find some other way. Does she actually believe in what she's doing? But
others who work in suicide prevention haven't bought into the NRA's propaganda absolving their precious guns from any responsibility for this spike in suicide.
But experts say that the urge to commit suicide is neither unstoppable nor permanent. “I emphasize that suicide is preventable — treatment works,” said Iliana Gilman, spokeswoman for a crisis hotline in Austin.
The impulse to commit suicide has been described as a trance, and the speed and lethality of a gun make it harder to interrupt the trance. Attempts at suicide are more than 20 times as likely to be fatal when a gun is used.
So, guns play an increasing role in suicide. They are very effective in committing suicide when used. We probably have more
guns in this society, now, than we have
people. And yet,
hundreds of thousands of Americans attempt suicide each year. If the NRA's argument from inevitability were correct, we should have a suicide rate 5 or 10 times as high as it is now. After all, don't these people who want to commit suicide inevitably succeed? And hasn't the NRA ensured easy access to a gun for anyone who wants to kill themselves?
Well, the gun proliferation, the lack of regulation, that much the NRA has accomplished. But treatment works, and so would stronger gun laws to reduce their availability. That is how the Washington Post closes:
“If I had to choose one thing,” said Joe, the Michigan professor, “I would try to reduce access and availability of firearms. The means matter more.”
But since the NRA has decreed that we can only talk about criminals, and demonizes the mentally ill as perpetrators of mass shootings, we're just talking background checks -- and not even getting that done. Meanwhile, we lose more people now to suicide than from car accidents, and guns make this possible. Even in those rural areas that prize gun ownership, their gun culture has admitted the instrument of more and more of their own deaths into their homes.