If today is a "normal" day, 20 people killed themselves with a handgun [View all]

[Recursion]

I hate to keep beating this horse but I think it's important.

As I mentioned in an earlier thread, the US has vastly more civilian guns than any other country. Vastly. Here's how vastly: I'm stationed in what is apparently the second most heavily armed country in the world, (that may be by raw numbers rather than per capita), and India has 1 / 100th the guns the US does. The US has 101 guns per 100 people; the next highest rate is hovering under 4 per 100.

So, we are literally trying something nobody else is, or you might say we're stuck with a situation nobody else is.

Anyways, while we have higher gun homicides (and homicides in general) than a lot of other countries, where we really break from the pack is overall gun deaths. Our total number of gun deaths is double our number of homicides of any sort. And the driving factor in that excess is one thing: suicide, made feasible by access to a gun. ("Success" rates with guns are much higher than almost any other method.)

A lot of you may think you know what I think about guns, but I'll clearly say: I want fewer guns in the US. Much fewer guns. Particularly handguns (I'm not terribly worried about rifles and shotguns, overall). I want the government to know who has them, I want the government to know where a given gun is, and I want them to be more expensive, harder to acquire, and less socially acceptable to own. Where I break with DU is that I haven't seen many proposals that I honestly think would advance that goal. (And in fact, it may need to be like drunk driving or smoking, where we use social stigma more than laws. Making that happen is not my wheelhouse, but there are people who work on that.)

While the shooting in Phoenix is horrible, and we certainly shouldn't ignore it, I want to point out my headline: if this is an "average" day, 20 people will have killed themselves with a handgun in the US. Two thirds of gun deaths are suicides, and if we want to be serious about reducing the gun death rate we need to address that. I don't know what in particular this means: mental health evaluations for purchasing/owning, some kind of technological solution, I don't know. And I'm not looking for perfect: I obviously don't dream that we can end all gun suicides. I just would like to get our gun suicide rate in line with other countries', and not have the majority of gun death victims also be the perpetrators.