An opinion item published by the Wall Street Journal equates the presence of guns in the home with suicide. https://www.wsj.com/articles/guns-donnas-law-and-preventing-suicides-11603481052
The problem? Realistically, we do not have anything like complete numbers on suicide but what we do have points to the presence of guns in a family works against gun related suicide.
To begin with, how many suicides are there? The truth is that we simply not have known three coroners nd a “ranger” none of whom would label a death suicide unless there was a note. Nor would have any of them given such a verdict unless a clearly self inflicted cause of death was known.
Many coroners and Medical Examiners thke that same course. As a long time frien, the late Lloyd Roseberry once sai, he was not about to deny a widow and orphans a life insurance payment because he thought it was suicide. I understand this opinion is common among those whose opinion on deaths matters.
We know that the population has been rising, pushing up the number of deaths every year. But how many suicides? How many of the estimated 3.8 million deaths a year were due to deliberate recreational drug overdoses? How many ot the now popular shopping bag asphyxiation? How many were poisoned with prescription drugs? We do not know.
But here is what we do know.
1.+ The incidence of gun suicides per 100,000 population is slowly declining.
2.) the popular plastic “T-shirr” shopping bag has pulled ahead of the gun as a suicide tool.
3) The number of “recreational drug” suicides is very large but most coroners do not have facilities to test for drug deaths so they go down as “natural causes.”
On point three, recall that George Floyd whose death was widely called murder, actually died of a self-ingested lethal dose of Fentynil , which shuts down the autonomous nervous system and stops breathing. Unless the would be suicide can stay awake and concentrate on breathing.
Stranger