Baggage Check: Gun Rights v. Suicide

Dr. Andrea Bonior dives into the world of psychology.

OPINIONS RUN STRONG on the issue of gun control. Long a mainstay of political campaigns and mildly belligerent bumper stickers, people's beliefs can be rigid and emotional, and the Supreme Court has stirred talk of this issue anew with their recent decision to strike down DC's handgun ban. In both anti- and pro-gun control camps, the arguments often revolve around crime rates and pseudo-philosophical musings about the right to bear arms. Sadly, rare does the discussion turn to what is arguably an even more significant issue — that merely owning a gun makes it much more likely that someone in your house will kill themselves.

No matter what your beliefs about the right to keep a handgun, the associated suicide statistics are startling. In fact, more than half of all deaths by firearms are from suicides, and when a suicide is committed in a home, that home is three to five times more likely to have had a firearm present than a home in which no suicide occurred.

It's safe to assume that virtually no one comes into gun ownership assuming that their loved one will use it to end their life, just as no one wants to believe that it will be their own teenage son who gets drunk and sad one night, becomes a little impulsive, and tears a permanent hole in the lives of those who loved him. People sometimes assume that if a suicidal person didn't have a gun, they would just find another way to end their life, but the numbers simply don't back that up. It also ignores the reality that many who kill themselves are under the influence of a substance — a state you never want to combine with the availability of a gun, the most instantaneous and irreversible method of attempting suicide out there.

It's time to get real about the risk of suicide in this country. We can talk for hours about how to be tougher on crime, but the fact remains that every day, by a large margin, more people kill themselves than kill others, and it's been this way for a long time. Let's acknowledge that, until people are willing to take the individual responsibility of protecting their family by keeping handguns out of the house, an overturned ban means that this problem will only get bigger.

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