Bizarrely, the entire gun debate tends to completely ignore two-thirds of the deaths: Gun suicides are almost twice as common as homicides in America (
19,392 to 11,078 in 2010). You wouldn't know it, since every murder gets reported on the local news and suicides don't, even though they dwarf murders by a wide margin (maybe even more than the stats say, since
loved ones have motivation to cover up suicides). The reasonable person will reply, "But that's not saying anything about guns, Cracked -- if depressed people want to kill themselves, they'll just find another way!"
Actually ... no, they won't. Whether guns are legal or not, whether you believe in gun control or not, here's the most important reason you'll ever hear for not keeping one in your home. It has to do with ovens.
In the first half of the 20th century, ovens in England used to burn coal gas, which happened to be completely lethal in concentrated doses and was thus the preferred way to commit suicide. By the late 1950s, sticking your head in the oven accounted for nearly half of all suicides committed in England. By the early 1970s, these ovens had been phased out, so nobody was surprised to see coal gas fall out of the top ten British suicide methods (one of Cracked.com's least popular recurring articles). So what did all of those suicidal people do instead? In a startling number of cases,
they just went right on living. The suicide rate dropped by a third, and it never went back up.
Wait, really? The decision to off yourself is kind of a big one, isn't it? It's not the sort of thing you just wait to do when the opportunity arises and your schedule opens up. Yet you can find plenty of examples of people being inconvenienced right the hell down from the ledge. Adding a suicide barrier to a bridge in Washington lowered not just the number of suicides that occurred on that bridge, but the overall suicide rate (meaning those people didn't just go find another bridge to jump from). A study of more than 500 Golden Gate Bridge jumpers who were stopped in the act found that 94 percent didn't try it again.
Suicides, it turns out, are often split-second decisions -- add even a few minutes' thought or just plain inconvenience to it, and a lot of the victims change their minds. Of course, that's not possible if your method involves instantly splattering your brains all over the wall with one pull of the trigger. If a bridge with a low barrier and a coal gas oven are Regis Philbin asking you to lock in your final answer, having a gun is like the
Jeopardy! clicker -- all you have to do is press one button a single time and it's done. No going back. So it's no surprise that one of the biggest risk factors for suicide
is simply having a gun in the house.
And nobody wants to talk about it, even though
this is twice the problem of all other gun violence combined. Gun suicides kill the equivalent of two Sandy Hook shootings
a day. But it's just so goddamn depressing to talk about, so we just ... don't.
that too
