I wrote down these thoughts about my sister and guns after a Seattle shooter in June. I find myself wanting to share them again now.
Last spring my younger sister Kathy jumped off a freeway bridge in Phoenix. For better or worse, she lived. Kathy made her first suicide gesture in high school, when she took a handful of –I think—aspirin in reaction to a bad haircut. At the time, she was already, obviously, mentally ill. In middle school, anorexia had drawn her down to a skeletal thirty-eight pounds. Her hair fell out. Her sunken face took on a plastic texture from fat soluble vitamins that her body couldn’t process. Force-feeding brought her back from the brink but couldn’t heal her. In the years since, even during three pregnancies, she has never topped a hundred pounds, nor has she ever been free of compulsions, body-loathing, or debilitating bouts of depression.
Since that first handful of analgesics, Kathy has made an effort to die somewhere between twelve and fifteen times: prescription pills, threatened jumps from an apartment balcony and a communications tower, an attempt at drowning, a car set on fire. Kathy is alive because even in the heart of Arizona’s Wild West no one will sell her a gun, a fact that she finds immensely frustrating at times that her bipolar illness takes her into another trough of despair.
For three days, Seattle has been reeling, grieving a wave of senseless violence that left five dead, including a shooter who was, from his family’s description, bipolar like my sister. Mentally ill women are most likely to exit this world alone or try to take their children with them. Some men prefer to go out in a blaze of rage and blood. Either way, access to a gun makes the impulse more lethal. Firearms are two and a half times more effective than the next method of suicide, suffocation. According to Centers for Disease Control statistics for 2003-2007, gunshots represented only three percent of suicide attempts but almost half of fatalities. So far this year over 40,000 people in the U.S. have been shot. By December 31, we can expect to bury about 9500, each dead at the hands of someone pulling a trigger. Guns were designed to be effective, efficient killing machines, and they work very well.
When someone kills – we ask why? It’s a worthy question. A part of the answer that haunts me (because it seems so preventable) is the way we choose as a society to prioritize our resources. We build for-profit prisons across the country, with lock up room for minor drug offenders. But while prisons are growing, prevention and treatment services are disappearing.
As a psychologist, I used to have an outpatient mental health practice in Seattle. By the time I quit, it was almost impossible to get public mental health services for a person who hadn’t been diagnosed with a chronic mental illness or acute intent to harm. I told one desperate and suicidal young woman with no health insurance that she could get inpatient treatment if she was willing to go in front of a judge and swear that she intended to hurt herself or someone else. She disappeared, and I didn’t know for weeks if she was still alive. Relentless cuts in funding and services over the last twenty years mean that psychiatrists, psychologists and caseworkers frequently offer a lower level of care than they believe is actually needed, and they are under constant pressure to pretend someone is more intact than they actually are.
The state of Arizona spent close to a million dollars last year putting Kathy back together after she fell forty nine feet. By contrast, they spent a pittance, a few thousand, on follow-up mental health assessment and treatment. Kathy’s car-on-fire incident a few years back was triggered by her SSI and Medicare being cut off because she had earned a couple hundred extra dollars working at Target over the holidays. Desperate to cut costs, the Social Security administrators decided that she wasn’t actually disabled--this is despite the fact that she has repeatedly ended up in restraints at state and county hospitals.
But even the best mental health treatment in the world won’t prevent some people from just losing it. There are going to be people who want to die. There are going to be people who want to kill. Most of the time the impulse passes. Whether someone dies before it does depends largely on the tools at hand. I once traveled with a handful of young adventurers and a couple of fishermen in an open skiff from southern Belize to Honduras. Constant salt spray meant we were chilled to the bone, and in the middle of the night we stopped on a small offshore island for hot drinks. There we were greeted by a wiry black man in his sixties. A deep scar ran across his face, from cheekbone to chin. Another deformed one arm. He was missing digits. He told us that as a young man he had been assaulted with a machete. I was fascinated and horrified by his graphic story, and one thought imbedded itself permanently in my mind: It takes a lot of effort to kill someone with a machete.
With a gun, it takes very little.
Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.