http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1819165,00.html?xid=rss-topstories Have gun, will kill...self?
I'm guessing this figure would be a lot less if it were intended gun deaths. I mean that you're unlikely to fail to kill yourself with a gun, yet you are a lot more likely to fail to kill someone else with a gun.
Guns are the best way to commit suicide because they are instantaneous, painless, relatively foolproof, and don't require a lot of preparation or energy. People take pills and then they change their mind so they end up in the hospital, get years of mandatory psychotherapy, and ruin their careers so their lives are worse than they started. Jumping off a roof is painful, drowning is ghastly, auto exhaust is way too much planning. Electrocution is hard to do right. Turning on a gas valve is scary because you might just blow yourself out the window and wind up with third-degree burns but alive and in agony. A gun is final, you don't feel a thing, and you can't change your mind. There's a phenomenon that shrinks talk about, although I don't know if they have a name for it. Once you make a decision to take a positive step toward solving an emotional problem, you instantly feel better about it. It's a cliche that depressed people finally decide their life is so awful that they make an appointment to see a therapist. Then the next morning they wake up and, since they've done something to make it better, they feel better, so they cancel the appointment. Some people do this over and over. That's what happens with a lot of suicides. They take the pills and then because they've finally done something about their problems, they don't feel so bad. So they don't want to die any more and they call 911. And in a few days they feel as bad or worse than they started, especially if they've been snared by the authorities, or if they have to deal with the sad and angry family they were trying to abandon. A gun doesn't give you a chance to back out. In Germany and Sweden, at least a few years ago if not still true, every fatal accident involving a Mercedes or Volvo (respectively) was investigated in great detail by forensic engineers from the factory, who didn't share their findings with police or insurance companies so people cooperated with them. They discovered that the majority of single-car fatal accidents were suicides. I wonder if the same thing is true in other countries. Driving your car into a concrete abutment doesn't give you much time to change your mind and it's final--although for my money it doesn't seem quite as neat and painless as a gun. But it has the tremendous advantage that if it's not ruled a suicide, your family can collect your life insurance.
I agree with Fraggle. If you are committed to killing yourself, guns are an attractive method of doing so, for a variety of reasons. As such, the 55% number (which I have no trouble believing is accurate) is not necessarily indicating that guns are abnormally dangerous. Many people who kill themselves with guns simply would have chosen some other method were guns not available. I would also agree that some of those people might then survive more readily and some would be deterred entirely given the unattractiveness of the other available options. So guns probably do increase the overall number of suicide deaths simply by being available...but the same could be said of many dangerous fruits of technology. Pills or running your car in an enclosed space long enough to displace the oxygen, for example, can make for pain-free deaths and that makes these methods attractive as compared to, say, hanging. Obviously, that is not a strong argument for banning cars or pills.
I recall one study from a few years ago, that said: In the US there is a statistical bump in suicides about two weeks after a famous suicide. There is also a bump in single car single occupant crashes about two weeks after a famous suicide. From the size of the bump, the conclusion was that at least a third of US deaths in such crashes were suicides. I would guess the proportion would be lower in the US general car population than among expensive car owners in Germany, due to car culture characteristics as well as other available means. Such as guns. It's something to remember when comparing suicide rates in different countries. It's basically dishonest to omit at least an estimate of car crash suicides, in the US stats. But they do.
ieaura, thats actually why in general suicides are never published in the media in australia, to discorage copy cats. Yes we cant get away from something like heath legers suicide but if say a school kid kills themself its reported as "a problem with the train lines delayed trains for a hour" (an example) or not at all
depends on how its done, if you fall far enough that your neck snaps then yes it is. most hangings however the person strangles to death which means there is a good chance they can be resucitated depending on how long they have been down
only if the neck is broken when the person drops, also i dont know about good form of death, becasue they piss themselves, and somtimes even shit themselves, if we ahve to tlak about ways to kill, what about the lethal injction?
it depends on the injection LA. Morphine causes respitory supression in large doses, barbituates cause compleat respitory shutdown, air causes respitory arest, pure water would cause all your cells to swell and burst. There are thousands more you could list Paracitomol causes liver failure, blue ring octpus venom causes repitory paralisis
Lethal injection is hard to go about in most countries though. I think in most countries you can get a gun easily enough (even in England it's no hassle to get a shotgun), and anywhere in the world you can find some tough rope and a nice fall.
a friend of mine at high school hung himself, he did it right where everyone walks past to go to school tooPlease Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I'm personally against the death penalty, but I've often wondered why instead of all of these elaborate setups (lethal injection, old way of electrocution) why they don't just use a gun to the head. Seems simpler, cheaper, etc. And if I was going to kill myself, I'd pick a gun too.
