Mental illness is real, and we need to find ways to work to reduce suicides in this country. Not just with guns, mind you, but with all methods. Still, reducing those carried out with guns is at least a good first step, as most so-called gun deaths are suicides.
This is something that all sides can probably agree on.
It’s everything after that where there doesn’t seem to be any common ground.
That’s especially true when anti-gun lawmakers made some of the most offensive arguments humanly possible to push for gun control, such as what New York Assemblywoman Amy Paulin just made in the Yonkers Times.
Titled “Gun Control is Suicide Prevention,” it doesn’t start at the point as something to have a lot of hope in.
Then we get to the piece itself.
September is Suicide Prevention Month. What many people don’t realize is that firearms are the leading cause of suicide in the United States. More than half of all gun deaths each year are suicides. This reality underscores why we must address suicide prevention and gun control together.
We hear about shootings so often it’s almost numbing — in supermarkets, office buildings, churches, schools, synagogues. My heart breaks for the innocent victims and their families in the most recent tragedies at the 345 Park Avenue office building in New York and Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota. No one and nowhere is immune.
What we know is that when we limit gun access, we limit gun deaths. Japan proves this point. A nation of more than 120 million people, it sees roughly 10 gun deaths in an entire year. By comparison, the United States, with a population of 340 million, suffers nearly 40,000 gun deaths annually. Ten versus forty thousand. And suicides represent the majority of those deaths. Between 2018 and 2024, approximately 57% of gun deaths in the U.S. were suicides. New York has some of the most stringent gun control laws in the country, but we must do better when it comes to preventing suicide. And it comes down to one thing: access.
It would if Japan had a historically lower suicide rate in total. That’s not the case at all, though.
In fact, up until very recently, Japan’s suicide rate was significantly higher than that of the US. Much, much higher. The reasons why are plentiful, including a lack of cultural stigma on taking your own life and an honor-driven culture that saw suicide as a way to atone for failures. While seppuku isn’t the proper way to deal with failure in Japan these days, that history remains and likely colors people’s perceptions of the world.
So if the problem is access, why does a country like Japan have such a high suicide rate itself?
In fact, at the risk of using Wikipedia because it’s an easy reference, there are 24 nations with a higher suicide rate than the United States as of 2021. None of them has easy access to firearms.
Of the industrialized nations that come up right behind the United States on that list, none of them have easy access to firearms.
What Paulin is doing here is equating suicide by firearm with suicide in general. In short, she makes it clear that if you slit your wrists or hang yourself or jump off a tall building, she doesn’t care. She’s only worried about suicide by firearm.
That’s kind of disgusting, if you ask me, especially as she uses this very serious issue to push a couple of bills, one of which is a 10-day waiting period, which is something anti-gunners routinely want for reasons that have nothing to do with suicide.
The other is a voluntary waiver of gun rights, which is about as stupid as it gets, though at least it’s clear to see how this is tied to the issue at hand.
Interestingly, though, New York’s universal background check law actually makes it harder for people in distress. They can’t lawfully hand their guns to a friend for safekeeping. If Paulin were serious about this issue, she should look at addressing that, among many other issues.
But she’s just interested in restricting access to guns, and suicides by firearm is a handy scapegoat.
It’s offensive, disgusting, and yet another reason why anti-gun lawmakers shouldn’t be taken seriously on anything.
Editor’s Note: The radical left, which includes people like Paulin, will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights, and they’ll use any issue they can to do so.
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