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EvC Forum Side Orders Coffee House Gun Control Again

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Author Topic:   Gun Control Again
Tangle
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From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4461 of 5179 (772591)
11-16-2015 12:26 PM
Reply to: Message 4460 by dronestar
11-16-2015 12:11 PM


Re: I AM suggesting . . .
Too silly to require comment

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4460 by dronestar, posted 11-16-2015 12:11 PM dronestar has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4498 of 5179 (775097)
12-28-2015 6:57 AM
Reply to: Message 4497 by Hyroglyphx
12-28-2015 4:40 AM


Re: Gun Control in Missouri
Hyro writes:
Homicide by Gun Rate in the US: The rate of homicides involving a firearm decreased by 49% from 1992 to 2011, while the percentage of homicide victims killed by a firearm (67%) remained stable.
All crime rates with the exception of cybercrime - have fallen all round the developed world by 50% or more since the mid 90s. There are longwinded reasons for this. You need to compare relative rates not cherrypicked crime rates.
Additionally, there are 130,000 knife attacks in the UK alone, which goes to show that in the absence of guns, other means are not only available but also utilized. This goes to show, once again, that it's not about the tool being used but the intent of the person utilizing it.
In the UK there were 537 murders or 9 per million population. Care to tell us the US rates?
It's worth asking yourself too, given a choice would you prefer your gangs armed with knives or guns? I've said this before here, we have a problem with knife crime and gangs, so we brought it tougher knife laws, I'm not sure whever that has made any difference, but what we didn't do was allow more people to carry knives - that would have been insane wouldn't it.
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4497 by Hyroglyphx, posted 12-28-2015 4:40 AM Hyroglyphx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4499 by Hyroglyphx, posted 12-28-2015 7:34 AM Tangle has replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4500 of 5179 (775099)
12-28-2015 7:57 AM
Reply to: Message 4499 by Hyroglyphx
12-28-2015 7:34 AM


Re: Gun Control in Missouri
Hyro writes:
They aren't cherrypicked, they are relevant to the place with the highest collection of arms in the world.
Which still has the highest murder rate in the developed world. If ALL crime rates are falling all over the developed world, the US murder rate would be in double the trouble it is in if it too hadn't fallen.
And still the rate of both crime and gun crime are half of what it was and continues to fall. So if guns are truly the problem then we should be seeing an increase not a decline.
No, you'd expect gun crime to fall too, unless something exceptional was also happening - particularly as a major cause for the fall was a reduction in the drug epidemic that created the increase in crime starting in the 70s.
You're missing the point entirely, but the murder rate is 4.5, the lowest since the 60's. That's about 10,000 out of a population of 318 million, which is approximately 5 times higher than the UK at 65 million or so. So, you're comparing apples to oranges.
No, murder RATES compare apple with apples. Where you're going wrong is comparing the UK 9 per million with the US's 4.5 per 100,000.
But it's actually the opposite. That means there are other factors at play and that guns and gun laws cannot account for the disparity.
Gun laws alone don't account for the disparity, there are certainly other factors but you can't avoid the simple causation of guns and gun deaths.
You also need to factor in gun death and injury by accident and suicide....how many are those?
Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4499 by Hyroglyphx, posted 12-28-2015 7:34 AM Hyroglyphx has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4528 of 5179 (775274)
12-30-2015 5:38 PM
Reply to: Message 4525 by caffeine
12-30-2015 4:54 PM


Re: Suicides
Caffeine writes:
I'm also unconvinced by the gun-suicide link - even though it seems so intuitively obvious.
The intuition is correct. It's been empirically shown that the more convenient suicide methods are, the more deaths there are.
The changeover from poisonous town gas to natural gas lowered suicide rates because 'putting your head in the oven' no longer worked.
Reducing the number of paracetomol individuals can buy and even putting them in bubble packs reduced suicide attempts using them.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4525 by caffeine, posted 12-30-2015 4:54 PM caffeine has seen this message but not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4536 of 5179 (775380)
01-01-2016 5:32 AM
Reply to: Message 4533 by Hyroglyphx
01-01-2016 1:11 AM


Re: Gun Control in Missouri
Hyro writes:
That's a truly awful argument in favor of strict gun control, as if there aren't millions of ways a person determined to die can kill themselves. Would you outlaw tall buildings and bridges for jumpers? Rope and sheets for hangings? Razor blades? Eradicate all medication in the off chance someone might them to commit suicide?
Tangle writes:
It's been empirically shown that the more convenient suicide methods are, the more deaths there are.
The changeover from poisonous town gas to natural gas lowered suicide rates because 'putting your head in the oven' no longer worked.
Reducing the number of paracetomol individuals can buy and even putting them in bubble packs reduced suicide attempts using them.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4533 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-01-2016 1:11 AM Hyroglyphx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4537 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-01-2016 6:03 AM Tangle has replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(1)
Message 4539 of 5179 (775384)
01-01-2016 6:41 AM
Reply to: Message 4537 by Hyroglyphx
01-01-2016 6:03 AM


Re: Gun Control in Missouri
Hyro writes:
And as I stated, in the absence of guns suicidal people will still commit suicide. So what's your point?
The point is that you are wrong.
Suicides are reduced by making the method inconvenient. It is not always the case that someone with suicidal thoughts will kill themselves anyway. Some will find alternatives but for many the fact that there is no convenient method is enough to stop them for long enough to have second thoughts.
Simply enclosing headache pills in individual bubble wraps was enough to prevent a significant number of suicides. The fact that people had to unwrap fifty of so individual pills reduced suicide rates.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4537 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-01-2016 6:03 AM Hyroglyphx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4541 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-01-2016 7:04 AM Tangle has replied
 Message 4543 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-01-2016 7:24 AM Tangle has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4542 of 5179 (775388)
01-01-2016 7:21 AM
Reply to: Message 4541 by Hyroglyphx
01-01-2016 7:04 AM


Re: Gun Control in Missouri
Hyro writes:
Haha, I'm wrong, huh?
Yes.
Answer this simple question: Do people kill themselves without the use of guns? Yes or no.
Yes.
Now listen very carefully. When people do not have easy access to methods of suicide, fewer people kill themselves.
Given that piece of factual information - remember, I said it has been empirically proven to be the case and I gave you two examples - do you think that having a loaded gun in your bedroom would increase, decrease or be neutral to the probability of someone with suicidal tendancies killing themselves?
LOL, right, so inconveniencing suicidals is the solution for suicide prevention! Holy fuck!
Yes, as I said, it's the reason why it's hard to buy loose paracetamol (Tylenol) in the UK.
C'mon, that's an absurd argument to be making for a reason to unilaterally ban guns.
It's only one of the many good arguments. Others would be to reduce America's hideous murder rate and accidental gun injuries and deaths.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4541 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-01-2016 7:04 AM Hyroglyphx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4544 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-01-2016 7:34 AM Tangle has replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(2)
Message 4546 of 5179 (775394)
01-01-2016 8:23 AM
Reply to: Message 4544 by Hyroglyphx
01-01-2016 7:34 AM


Re: Gun Control in Missouri
Hyro writes:
What I think is that it is completely and entirely irrelevant since people find other means. Had you said that suicidal people tend to choose the more lethal method, the gun being a more effective method, I would have agreed. But even that is a specious reason for a unilateral ban.
I can see that you are totally impervious to both fact and reason - you seem to prefer your personal ideas to actual research and information. So be it.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4544 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-01-2016 7:34 AM Hyroglyphx has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4566 of 5179 (775490)
01-02-2016 6:25 AM
Reply to: Message 4565 by Hyroglyphx
01-02-2016 6:06 AM


Re: Gun Control in Missouri
Hyro writes:
But surely they DO given the fact that people commit suicide by other means.
The other example was conversion from town gas (highly poisonous) to natural gas (non-poisonous).
Results: As has previously been shown, there were marked reductions in suicides by gassing in men and women of all ages between 1960 and 1975. In women and younger men, the effects of these reductions on overall suicide rates were partially offset by rises in drug overdose deaths (method substitution), but there were no immediate increases in the use of other suicide methods. In contrast, in older men, reductions in suicide by gassing were accompanied by only a slight increase in overdose suicides as well as reductions in rates of suicide using all other methods. The modest rise in overdose fatalities in older men occurred despite the fact that they were more often prescribed barbiturates and tricyclic antidepressants than younger men. Conclusions: Accessibility to and the lethality of particular methods of suicide may have profound effects on overall suicide rates. Such effects appear to depend upon the popularity of the method and the extent to which alternative methods that are acceptable to the individual are available. Social and psychological interpretations of fluctuations in suicide rates should only be made after assessing the possible contribution to these of changes in method availability and lethality.
Method availability and the prevention of suicide — a re-analysis of secular trends in England and Wales 1950—1975 | SpringerLink

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4565 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-02-2016 6:06 AM Hyroglyphx has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4568 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-02-2016 6:52 AM Tangle has replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4570 of 5179 (775495)
01-02-2016 7:05 AM
Reply to: Message 4568 by Hyroglyphx
01-02-2016 6:52 AM


Re: Gun Control in Missouri
Hyro writes:
Right, "marked reductions in suicides by gassing," which means other methods are explored as evidenced by the fact that people every single day kill themselves in many, many different ways.
Well yes, of-fucking-course. Some people really, really want to kill themselves and will find a way no matter what.
Has it worked to a large degree? Yes, it has! But has it stopped suicides by other means? No, it hasn't.
Surprisingly - to you alone it seems - nobody is saying that if you remove guns from the equation that people will no longer commit suicide.
What we're saying - and producing the evidence to support the claim - is that when convenient methods of suicide are removed, suicides are reduced in total. Not stopped, reduced.
So if you get rid of guns, people will kill themselves by other means. That is absolutely, positively an indisputable fact so obvious that I feel silly even stating it.
Given that nobody is arguing that point and that I have already explicitly agreed with you on it, you are right to feel silly repeating it. Please at least try to understand the point actually being made, not the point you think is being made.
Lastly, how can you control for people who were once suicidal but changed their minds if they never reported it? How can you truly know the efficacy?
You measure the before and after suicide rates - as was done for both paracetamol and town gas.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4568 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-02-2016 6:52 AM Hyroglyphx has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(2)
Message 4584 of 5179 (775631)
01-03-2016 1:56 PM
Reply to: Message 4579 by Percy
01-03-2016 9:30 AM


Re: It's not you, it's the other guy!
Percy writes:
...the other guy coming toward you down the street with gun on hip...
So much going on in those few words.
1. The throw back image to the fantasy of the American Wild West. The cowboy strutting into town. Good guy/bad guy, black and white morality - all problems solved by the shoot-out. Freedom of action and honest, personal justice. Independence and power. Manliness and heroism.
2. The total absurdity of it set inside a modern Western liberal democracy where the image is as disturburbung to an outsider as a razor blade in the hand of a baby. The fact that any other democratic country simply can not understand how anybody other than a policeman could concievably carry a loaded gun in public.
3. The knowldege that this arcane cowboy image is creating a human catastrophy in the heart of an talismatic, Western society that really, really should know better.
It's a real shame that the USA can't move on from its fantasy past - how can it be the model for the world to follow, when it's so fucked up?

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4579 by Percy, posted 01-03-2016 9:30 AM Percy has seen this message but not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


(1)
Message 4596 of 5179 (775697)
01-04-2016 8:49 AM
Reply to: Message 4594 by Hyroglyphx
01-04-2016 6:13 AM


Re: Suicides
So we have the evidence that when town gas (poisonous) was replaced by natural gas (non-poisonous) suicide rates fell and that when paracetamol was restricted suicide rates dropped. Here we have the evidence from Australia that when their gun regulations were introduced, both homicide and suicide rates dropped.
Obviously all this is pure coincidence...as is the statement in bold regarding substitional sucide methods.
Harvard's David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis reviewed the research on Australia's suicide and homicide rate after the NFA. Their conclusion was clear: "The NFA seems to have been incredibly successful in terms of lives saved."
What they found is a decline in both suicide and homicide rates after the NFA. The average firearm suicide rate in Australia in the seven years after the bill declined by 57 percent compared with the seven years prior. The average firearm homicide rate went down by about 42 percent.
Now, Australia's homicide rate was already declining before the NFA was implemented so you can't attribute all of the drops to the new laws. But there's good reason to believe the NFA, especially the buyback provisions, mattered a great deal in contributing to those declines.
"First," Hemenway and Vriniotis write, "the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates."
There is also this: 1996 and 1997, the two years in which the NFA was actually implemented, saw the largest percentage declines in the homicide rate in any two-year period in Australia between 1915 and 2004.
Pinning down exactly how much the NFA contributed is harder. One study concluded that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides. But as Dylan Matthews points out, the results were not statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low number of murders already.
However, the paper's findings about suicide were statistically significant and astounding. Buying back 3,500 guns correlated with a 74 percent drop in firearm suicides. Non-gun suicides didn't increase to make up the decline.
There is good reason why gun restrictions would prevent suicides. As Matthews explains in great depth, suicide is often an impulsive choice, one often not repeated after a first attempt. Guns are specifically designed to kill people effectively, which makes suicide attempts with guns likelier to succeed than (for example) attempts with razors or pills. Limiting access to guns makes each attempt more likely to fail, thus making it more likely that people will survive and not attempt to harm themselves again.
Bottom line: Australia's gun buyback saved lives, probably by reducing homicides and almost certainly by reducing suicides. Again, Australian lessons might not necessarily apply to the US, given the many cultural and political differences between the two countries. But in thinking about gun violence and how to limit it, this seems like a worthwhile data point. If you're looking for lessons about gun control, this is a pretty important one.
Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted. - Vox

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4594 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-04-2016 6:13 AM Hyroglyphx has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4597 of 5179 (775703)
01-04-2016 9:55 AM
Reply to: Message 4594 by Hyroglyphx
01-04-2016 6:13 AM


Re: Suicides
You reckoned that putting anti-suicide defences on bridges doesn't deter suicides.
Turns out that's not correct either.
In Northwest Washington stands a pretty neoclassical-style bridge named for one of the city’s most famous native sons, Duke Ellington. Running perpendicular to the Ellington, a stone’s throw away, is another bridge, the Taft. Both span Rock Creek, and even though they have virtually identical drops into the gorge below about 125 feet it is the Ellington that has always been notorious as Washington’s suicide bridge. By the 1980s, the four people who, on average, leapt from its stone balustrades each year accounted for half of all jumping suicides in the nation’s capital. The adjacent Taft, by contrast, averaged less than two.
After three people leapt from the Ellington in a single 10-day period in 1985, a consortium of civic groups lobbied for a suicide barrier to be erected on the span. Opponents to the plan, which included the National Trust for Historic Preservation, countered with the same argument that is made whenever a suicide barrier on a bridge or landmark building is proposed: that such barriers don’t really work, that those intent on killing themselves will merely go elsewhere. In the Ellington’s case, opponents had the added ammunition of pointing to the equally lethal Taft standing just yards away: if a barrier were placed on the Ellington, it was not at all hard to see exactly where thwarted jumpers would head.
Except the opponents were wrong. A study conducted five years after the Ellington barrier went up showed that while suicides at the Ellington were eliminated completely, the rate at the Taft barely changed, inching up from 1.7 to 2 deaths per year. What’s more, over the same five-year span, the total number of jumping suicides in Washington had decreased by 50 percent, or the precise percentage the Ellington once accounted for.
What makes looking at jumping suicides potentially instructive is that it is a method associated with a very high degree of impulsivity, and its victims often display few of the classic warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. In fact, jumpers have a lower history of prior suicide attempts, diagnosed mental illness (with the exception of schizophrenia) or drug and alcohol abuse than is found among those who die by less lethal methods, like taking pills or poison. Instead, many who choose this method seem to be drawn by a set of environmental cues that, together, offer three crucial ingredients: ease, speed and the certainty of death.
So why the Ellington more than the Taft? In its own way, that little riddle rather buttresses the environmental-cue theory, for the one glaring difference between the two bridges a difference readily apparent to most anyone who walked over them in their original state was the height of their balustrades. The concrete railing on the Taft stands chest-high on an average man, while the pre-barrier Ellington came to just above the belt line. A jump from either was lethal, but one required a bit more effort and a bit more time, and both factors stand in the way of impulsive action.
But how do you prove that those thwarted from the Ellington, or by any other suicide barrier, don’t simply choose another method entirely? As it turns out, one man found a clever way to do just that. With a somewhat whimsical manner and the trace of a grin constantly working at one corner of his mouth, Richard Seiden has the appearance of someone always in the middle of telling a joke. It’s not what you might expect considering that Seiden, a professor emeritus and clinical psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley School of Public Health, is probably best known for his pioneering work on the study of suicide. Much of that work has focused on the bridge that lies just across San Francisco Bay from campus, the Golden Gate.
Since its opening in 1937, the bridge has been regarded as one of the architectural and engineering marvels of the 20th century. For nearly as long, the Golden Gate has had the distinction of being the most popular suicide magnet on earth, a place where an estimated 2,000 people have ended their lives. Over the years, there have been a number of civic campaigns to erect a suicide barrier on the bridge, but all have foundered on the same they’ll just find another way belief that made the Ellington barrier so contentious.
In the late 1970s, Seiden set out to test the notion of inevitability in jumping suicides. Obtaining a Police Department list of all would-be jumpers who were thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 an astonishing 515 individuals in all he painstakingly culled death-certificate records to see how many had subsequently completed. His report, Where Are They Now? remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent.
That’s still a lot higher than the general population, of course, Seiden, 75, explained to me over lunch in a busy restaurant in downtown San Franciso. But to me, the more significant fact is that 90 percent of them got past it. They were having an acute temporary crisis, they passed through it and, coming out the other side, they got on with their lives.
In Seiden’s view, a crucial factor in this boils down to the issue of time. In the case of people who attempt suicide impulsively, cutting off or slowing down their means to act allows time for the impulse to pass perhaps even blocks the impulse from being triggered to begin with. What is remarkable, though, is that it appears that the same holds true for the nonimpulsive, with people who may have been contemplating the act for days or weeks.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Seiden said, people who attempt suicide aren’t thinking clearly. They might have a Plan A, but there’s no Plan B. They get fixated. They don’t say, ‘Well, I can’t jump, so now I’m going to go shoot myself.’ And that fixation extends to whatever method they’ve chosen. They decide they’re going to jump off a particular spot on a particular bridge, or maybe they decide that when they get there, but if they discover the bridge is closed for renovations or the railing is higher than they thought, most of them don’t look around for another place to do it. They just retreat.
That comes from a very good article in the New York Times. I highly recommend that you read it.
The Urge to End It - Understanding Suicide - The New York Times
From the same article is research demonstrating that you're wrong about people always finding alternative ways to kill themselves:
In the late 1970s, Seiden set out to test the notion of inevitability in jumping suicides. Obtaining a Police Department list of all would-be jumpers who were thwarted from leaping off the Golden Gate between 1937 and 1971 an astonishing 515 individuals in all he painstakingly culled death-certificate records to see how many had subsequently completed. His report, Where Are They Now? remains a landmark in the study of suicide, for what he found was that just 6 percent of those pulled off the bridge went on to kill themselves. Even allowing for suicides that might have been mislabeled as accidents only raised the total to 10 percent.
And on gun suicide specifically.
We’re always going to have suicide, Hemenway said, and there’s probably not that much to be done for the ones who are determined, who succeed on their 4th or 5th or 25th try. The ones we have a good chance of saving are those who, right now, succeed on their first attempt because of the lethal methods they’ve chosen.
Inevitably, this approach means focusing on the most common method of suicide in the United States: firearms. Even though guns account for less than 1 percent of all American suicide attempts, their extreme fatality rate anywhere from 85 percent and 92 percent, depending on how the statistics are compiled means that they account for 54 percent of all completions. In 2005, the last year for which statistics are available, that translated into about 17,000 deaths. Public-health officials like Hemenway can point to a mountain of research going back 40 years that shows that the incidence of firearm suicide runs in close parallel with the prevalence of firearms in a community. In a 2007 study that grouped the 15 states with the highest rate of gun ownership alongside the six states with the lowest (each group had a population of about 40 million), Hemenway and his associates found that when it came to all nonfirearm methods, the two populations committed suicide in nearly equal numbers. The more than three-times-greater prevalence of firearms in the high gun states, however, translated into a more than three-times-greater incidence of firearm suicides, which in turn translated into an annual suicide rate nearly double that of the low gun states. In the same vein, their 2004 study of seven Northeastern states found that the 3.5 times greater rate of gun suicides in Vermont than in New Jersey exactly matched the difference in gun ownership between the two states (42 percent of all households in Vermont opposed to 12 percent in New Jersey). From these and other such studies, the Injury Control Research Center has extrapolated that a 10 percent reduction in firearm ownership in the United States would translate into a 2.5 percent reduction in the overall suicide rate, or about 800 fewer deaths a year.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4594 by Hyroglyphx, posted 01-04-2016 6:13 AM Hyroglyphx has not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4631 of 5179 (775954)
01-07-2016 5:47 AM
Reply to: Message 4630 by xongsmith
01-07-2016 4:41 AM


Yeh, really radical stuff. Someone will have to shoot him now.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4630 by xongsmith, posted 01-07-2016 4:41 AM xongsmith has seen this message but not replied

Tangle
Member
Posts: 9489
From: UK
Joined: 10-07-2011
Member Rating: 4.9


Message 4701 of 5179 (777716)
02-06-2016 1:42 PM
Reply to: Message 4700 by Faith
02-06-2016 12:13 PM


Re: It Goes on and on
Faith writes:
I'm also in favor of safety measures, only I don't know enough about guns to know which would be the best choice.
It's been scientifically proven that not allowing people to have guns, significantly reduces the number of gun related deaths and injuries. Strange but true.

Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien.
Life, don't talk to me about life - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 4700 by Faith, posted 02-06-2016 12:13 PM Faith has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 4703 by Hyroglyphx, posted 02-07-2016 12:52 AM Tangle has replied

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