Suicide & guns.

[Yo_Mama]

6. People also kill themselves in their cars

I am terribly sorry for the loss of your son, but in my experience a person determined to kill him/herself does.

After my father's death, I went through my mother's house and threw away the drug hoard she had been compiling to kill herself with if things got too bad (she was ill with a very painful disease at the time). She wasn't at all irrational, so I wasn't concerned about anything but a rational suicide due an increase of her physical pain and a decline in her physical functioning.

Within a month I found that she had written to the Hemlock Society and had gotten a nice pamphlet of helpful instructions about killing yourself with the minimum fuss and inconvenience to anyone else. This alarmed me, because I thought that she was very afraid of becoming dependent and ruining her children's lives, so the idea of making it all convenient was going to shift the balance in her mind. So I moved in with her, and stayed for a year. The treatment worked and her physical condition improved.

Nineteen years later, my mother's life was ended by a man who ran a red light early one morning and crushed her car. She died in the car about 70 feet away from the EMT station. It would have been different if the treatment hadn't worked - she was able to go back to work and felt useful. That was what changed things - nothing that I could have done would have changed things if the treatment hadn't worked.

Again, I am sorry for your loss, but guns don't cause suicides. They are a means. They may, by being there and being effective, facilitate one, but I do not think that the number of suicides would meaningfully change if all the guns in the US suddenly vanished. I think instead a lot of people would kill themselves with their cars. That's how most of the people I have known killed themselves - I think they thought it provided plausible deniability for their families.

I think a better mental health system and a better economy would meaningfully reduce the suicide rate. I think about the people I have known who killed themselves, and I think that only a few could have been prevented by even those things.

I don't know what to say to you about the loss of your son - just that you are not alone in this suffering and you are not responsible for his death.