TW: discussion of suicide and homicide
My 16 year old daughter texted me in the middle of class. We have a family policy that the kids always have their phones close to hand even if it means breaking school rules, so when I got a text from my kiddo in the middle of the day, I didn’t panic.
Until I saw the text.
“Lockdown. Teacher freaking out. Not a drill”
For the next 45 minutes, I combed through every police and school social media page, desperate to find information. 3 high schools in the area were on lockdown, including Columbine, just a few miles from my daughter’s school.
I also spent that 45 minutes texting B. Because not many kids had their phones, they used B’s phone to text me their last messages to their parents.
“I love you.”
“Mom I’m scared.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye this morning. I love you.”
“I’m scared.”
“I’m scared.”
“I’m scared.”
This time, the active shooter didn’t get in the building.
This time, the active shooter didn’t kill anyone.
This time, everyone walked away ok.
Well, not ok. They walked away with trauma, and PTSD, and the knowledge that there will be a next time, and that next time may be the time they don’t walk away.
Want to know a secret? We can absolutely end active shooter threats.
Want proof?
I sat on the school district safety committee and I have some insider information that may help. When talking about active shooters, the police have one goal: reduce the number of kids who die by gun violence in our schools. They don’t have a plan to get to zero deaths because those plans require one thing that the U.S. doesn’t have the political will to do.
I’m also a suicide prevention trainer. I helped our school district design and implement mandatory suicide prevention training for all adults employed by the district. I hear a lot of people talking about mental health issues and their impact on active shooter events. I have some insider information about that, too. Every country has mental health needs. Does the U.S. need better access to therapists, including a national healthcare system that pays for therapy? Absolutely. I’m all in favor of that.
But that won’t end active shooter events. I doubt it would even reduce them. Why? Because it isn’t about mental health needs.
It’s about the guns.
Sociologists are currently studying the link between homicide and suicide deaths. In Kentucky, just under 7% of all firearm homicide deaths were followed by the suicide firearm death of the shooter. 2/3 of those cases involved the murder of an intimate partner. In the U.S. it frequently plays out like this: someone (usually a man) uses a weapon (almost always a gun) to kill other people before killing themself or, sometimes, being in a place where the police will shoot them (suicide by police). While there seems to be a correlation, not necessarily a causation, between homicide and suicide rates, one thing is clear: in the U.S., gun access directly increases the rates of both homicide deaths and suicide deaths.
Roughly 50% of all suicide deaths in the U.S. involve a firearm. Most of suicide deaths with firearms are men, mostly between the ages of 25-50. If we could snap our fingers and make all the firearms in the U.S. disappear, our suicide death rate would decrease by 50%.
I can hear some readers say, “That isn’t true! Where there’s a will, there’s a way. People will just figure out another way to die!” Some people will, that’s true. But the majority of people do not look for another way to die by suicide. The majority of people have a certain script that plays out in their heads for days or years, and in the U.S., for men, that script generally involves a gun.
9 out of 10 suicide attempts using a firearm result in death. Guns are the most deadly form of suicide in the world.
People who attempt suicide via poisoning (including overdose), jumping, or cutting are less likely to die for a variety of reasons, so even if someone looks for an alternative method, they’re still safer than if they have access to a gun.
First, firearms are the most effective, easily accessible, and one of the least technical means of suicide, making them highly deadly.
Second, other methods give people a chance to get help. Most people experience regret immediately after attempting suicide, so methods that have a longer time to take effect allow people the time they need to get help.
Third, non-gun suicide attempts give other people a chance to intervene.
We know through decades of analysis that the vast majority of people who survive a suicide attempt do no attempt again. Firearms don’t often give people a second chance.
It’s the guns.
You know what else firearms do well? They kill other people more effectively. Remember the scene in Indiana Jones, where the one guy is flipping his giant sword around and then Jones pulls out his gun and shoots the guy? The scene works for a reason. It’s a lot harder for a person with a knife to kill other people, and a person with a knife is a lot easier to subdue than a person with a gun. To date, my children have sheltered in place a total of zero times because of an active knife threat.
Gun owners and their families die by suicide at higher rates than non-gun owners.
We have evidence from other countries who have successfully reduced their suicide death rates by keeping the means of death out of people’s hands.
In Sri Lanka, human toxic pesticides were the leading method of suicide death. Following a series of pesticide bans between 1995-2015, Sri Lankan suicide death rates fell by 70%. That’s without increasing their access to mental health services.
In England and Wales, carbon monoxide rich home gas used to be the suicide method of choice. Between 1963-1975, England and Wales took the carbon monoxide out of the home gas and suicide rates plummeted nearly 50%
It’s the guns.
New Zealand banned assault weapons following the 2016 Mosque shooting. They’ve had zero mass shootings since then.
Scotland has had 2 events since their ban, neither of which have been at a school.
By prioritizing gun culture, we’ve criminalized our kids. We make them wear clear backpacks or no backpacks; some go through metal detectors; some get searched every day (including one local middle school which has a list of kids who are patted down every morning). And all of them, every one, goes to school with the knowledge that today might be their turn to die. My kids talk about when, not if, they’re the target.
My friends who work in schools hold trauma so extreme they can’t sleep at night.
My friend’s children were told, in elementary school, that it was their job to stand in front of a shooter so their friends could live.
We don’t have to live like this.
Our children don’t have to live like this.
We’re choosing to let them die like this.
Every other industrialized nation, and a great number of industrializing nations, have figured out how to prevent mass shooting events, including those related to mental health breaks and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. There is no secret.
It’s the guns. It’s the guns. It’s the guns.
In the U.S., if you or someone you love is thinking about suicide, call 988 and get help.
22 Responses
This post is so important and should not be controversial at all.
Those texts from your daughter and her friends! Heartbreaking. And yes, it’s the guns.
Our school district recently had an active shooter scare. One of the things that hurt the most was other friends commenting on Facebook saying that they had gone through similar scares. It’s so common. My daughter gave a Sacrament talk later that week. She said she looked around at her classmates and decided that she loved them enough that she would be willing to die to try to save their lives. My mama heart! On the one hand, I would be super proud to have her be heroic. But on the other hand, that’s my kid. I hate that she even had to imagine doing such a thing in such a realistic scenario. It’s heavy. And wrong. I don’t want the world to be like this.
That’s heart wrenching. Kids shouldn’t have to be heroes. They should play in mud and run through streams and each too much ice cream, but they should never have to decide to die for someone else. Especially for someone else’s imagined right to own a weapon.
Yeah. Kaitlin Shetler wrote a letter suggesting that kids should get monthly hazard pay for attending school, just like soldiers get. It’s ludicrous that the idea sounds rational.
Your post has got me thinking and I’m back for another comment.
Less than a year ago, I moved from a liberal city in the Pacific Northwest to the south – in a state where it is really easy to get guns. Before I moved, the only people I knew who owned guns used them to shoot guns in the forest and kept them locked up the rest of the time.
Two weeks ago, an instructor in my department (I’m a professor) got really angry. He sent out an email to everyone in the department expressing his anger through (what seemed to be) some drunken words. I read the email, and given the context in which I think, thought to myself, “Wow, he’s angry.” And I laughed a little at how nonsensical his email seemed. However, for others in the department, they read the email and thought, “Oh no, he’s come unhinged and will likely be bringing his gun to campus and open fire.” That thought never occurred to me before they told me that. Many professors opted to teach online for the next few days because they were literally scared for their lives. It was such a shock to me that, due to huge access to guns here, it’s the assumption that when someone is mad, gun fire is likely.
oops, typo. should have said, “…used them to shoot *deer in the forest”
What a scary experience. And to live with that thought circling through your mind—the pressure must be enormous
We recently had a midweek Relief Society activity about emergency preparedness. All the women were joking/not joking about the guns their husbands had as part of their preparedness plans. When I walk through that scenario, I’m horrified .. do they plan on shooting people to protect themselves? Who are they protecting themselves from? We live in Utah County, where practically the entire neighborhood attends church. Are they going to shoot members of our congregation who ask for help? Are they going to shoot me or my kids? In the meantime, before the apocalypse, are my kids safe playing at their houses? Are they safe going to school with their kids? One of the women commenting was the stake president’s wife. Are we even safe at church?
I have also had texts with my kids during a school lockdown. Those texts you shared brought me to tears. I am so so sorry. Guns are weapons. They are terrorism.
I work as a Para-Educator, and shooter drills with special education students are particularly difficult. We let them sit on beanbag chairs to try to make it fun and hope no one has a meltdown.
I absolutely agree. It is the guns!
This is so much more than just about guns. It’s easy to blame firearms of whatever variety as the boogeyman de jour.
By that, I mean NO POLITICIANS’ names will be mentioned. This is about an issue, NOT a personality.
While there will be those who disagree with me, the 2nd Amendment to the United States Constitution covers the right to keep and bear arms. It has not been — nor will it ever be — superseded or repealed.
Our status as a free nation and guardian to much of the free world depends on it, especially in light of recent, ongoing developments and aggression by both Communist China and Russia/the Soviet Union.
Included in a RESPONSIBLE DISCUSSION are a number of variables I will seek to address, hopefully in the right order, although the order should not matter as much as they’re being addressed, period.
We begin with the issue of fathers in the home — as not all shooters come from single parent families — as the Columbine shooters were from two-parent homes, so the shooter issue comes from all types of families.
As a retired educator myself, we have to examine a more basic point, and that was the politically correct idiots who made school zones ‘Gun-Free’ Zones, which turned every single one of them into a shooter’s paradise.
Now I’m not implying schools should be turned into 24/7 locked-down fortresses the way some states went overboard with unhealthy extremes on masking, but some serious changes need to be made, in addition to a boost in mental health funding, but not for its sake alone.
However, in keeping with my personal rule #2, ‘Always solve problems at the lowest possible level’, that is best achieved by (1), REMOVING the ‘Gun-Free’ Zone signs from every school, college, university, hospital, and church in the country. We cannot be giving lunatics any more ideas.
This sends a message to the nutjobs with weapons they shouldn’t have (mentally unstable, felons, convicted DV offenders, etc.), to know — not that they follow either the law or the rules — that enhancer penalties will apply at sentencing, assuming they do not die suicide by cop first.
As uncomfortable as this may make some, the right to self-defense is both GOD-GIVEN AND INHERENT. What that means, is that one need not lay down like a lamb to the slaughter, just because some loser can’t score with the ladies.
This is where select employees — specifically the custodian, select teachers and administrators, preferably those who served honorably in the military — can be trained and QUALIFIED for concealed carry permits, with nobody in the school system being allowed to disclose their carry status, for their protection.
Only the state-issuing body for the conceal carry license would know who’s carrying and who isn’t; again, for their safety and protection.
As a Marine, my fellow Marines and I — both then and even today — trained for war, in order that our children and grandchildren could live in peace. Your children and grandchildren should be able to live in peace too.
These selected armed people within schools can be a major pre-emptive deterrent in either preventing loss of life in a shooting, or minimizing injury to, and/or loss of life to the innocent.
While I stand firmly against Capital Punishment, I just as firmly make TWO EXCEPTIONS; those two being TREASON, a declared war on the state; and TERRORISM, whether foreign or domestic, with school or other mass shootings qualifying as DOMESTIC TERRORISM, and a conviction mandating EXECUTION on account of the shooter’s intent to kill as many as possible, until he (or she) was stopped.
If the state involved has no death penalty (Michigan, for example), then the case should be tried federally, with the possibility of the death penalty as an option.
It will not be until we see enough positive forward movement in reducing these unacceptable catastrophes, that they can be placed properly in the past.
One last thought: In Israel in 1973, they had a school shooting where two students were killed, before the shooter was executed on the spot by two teachers.
Part of the speedy resolution came about because all Israeli adults have to carry a weapon 24/7. Kinda necessary when you have enemies all around you bent on your 24/7 destruction.
In the 50 years since, ZERO school shootings.
Food for thought: Have a great week!
That’s a really long way to say you prioritize guns over children’s lives.
You prioritize children’s lives by being properly TRAINED in the responsible and SAFE use of firearms, knowing they are a LAST RESORT.
It’s all about training, training, and more training! As a Marine and serving as a cop there, I was at the range WEEKLY, keeping my proficiency in top form for a weapon that — thank God — I never had to fire EVEN ONCE in the line of duty.
The meme says it best: “The Second Amendment IS NOT about hunting deer. It’s about stopping thugs from hunting your family!”
Going back in time, Orlando has a serious problem with rapes in the late 60s. Police there started weapons training courses to help women there…and this is the key point here…LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD there.
They were trained on numerous weapons by NRA certified instructors, afforded the opportunity to try out different types of weapons on the range, and be qualified for, and be issued concealed carry licenses.
The result with this weapons qualification: Orlando’s rape ‘problem’ disappeared when the perps realized they might get their nutsacks blown off. That’s be an awkward explanation when they got ‘inside the wall’…
That makes a HUGE impact for many women. If a woman who’s 4’10”, and 95 pounds soaking wet is walking down the street sees some lumbering big guy headed her way, she can not only still walk with her head high and comfortably, but has an added item in her personal toolbox of self-defense, SHOULD SHE NEED TO USE IT.
That weapon she may have anywhere on her person (and I’ve known some who wore them in their bra — seriously!), literally levels the playing field, if she has to protect herself in an emergency. 🚨
All I’m getting at is, leave all options open, and don’t demonize those who choose to ‘lock and load’…
I clearly said guns are the problem–not people. By refusing to entertain the idea that guns are, in fact, the cause, you have closed off our most promising option–gun prohibitions. Don’t demonize those who have different experiences and knowledge than you do–I am, in fact, an expert in suicide deaths and in school shootings. There is no level playing field when some people are armed and others aren’t–unless your suggestion is to arm every single person in the US? Including our school children? That’s the most dystopian future I can imagine. If that’s the land of the free, home of the brave you dream of, your dreams are deeply disturbed and will result in even more of a blood bath than we already have.
If you truly want weapons prohibition, move to a socialist hellhole of absolute prohibition of weapons of any kind.
Be completely powerless to protect yourself from predators of any kind. In wishing for total weapons prohibition, you best be careful, lest you get your wish granted.
Hitler. 1935 Germany.
Mao 1949 Communist (Red) China. Pol Pot 1975 Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge.
All these madmen misused weapons to rationalize mass killings.
The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America 🇺🇸 serves as a check and balance against those who seek to strip us of our other freedoms, to include freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, as well as the right to peaceably assemble for the redress of grievances.
If you give those up, you give them all up, and are left defenseless to those who will do you harm — or worse.
Be careful of what you wish for; and should you leave the USA, leave your passport on the way out as you leave with your 1-way ticket…
I’m trying to decide which thread of your convoluted and poorly-reasoned response is the most ridiculous–your theory that some dude bro with a gun would have stopped Hitler, Mao, or the Khmer Rouge; your complete ignorance of Jesus’s ministry (I seem to be missing the part of the Bible that promises gun-ownership in Zion); your assumption that a weapon will kill the most dangerous predators (who are overwhelmingly white dude bros with guns); your belief that any country that limits gun ownership is socialist (so, China and Japan are socialist? Hmmm…I don’t think the word ‘socialist’ means what you think it means); or the way you out yourself as a violent white supremacist by falling back on the “don’t like it then leave” argument, a favorite tactic of supremacist hate groups. Know why I know gun prohibitions work? Because grenade prohibitions work. Know how I know arguing “BUT FREEDOM AND GOD!” is a misdirect? Because the same people who loooooove their guns and refuse to discuss weapons prohibitions are the same people who want to ban healthcare, books, CRT, accurate history, story time, the entire trans population… You can believe what you want to believe, but when it comes to gun deaths in the US, you’re simply wrong. But for the sake of argument, I’ll agree to let people like you have as many weapons as you want, provided they’re the same weapons available to the writers of the US Constitution.
I am curious if you came across any resources that might explain suicide rates in Japan 2-3x those in the United States, with very limited access to firearms.
Anthony: A large portion of the variable in play with Japan, is the culture. Japanese culture is very intense with high, even almost 24/7 pressure to perform and achieve to get into the right universities. That — in part — explains the adolescent and young adult suicide rate being higher than other countries. It’s even more so in a country with an aging population needing a rising generation to help take care of them. It must also balance their skill set out with those who do not want university educations, but who choose to go into the trades, such as plumbers, auto mechanics, hairdressing, nursing, etc. I hope this help explain this, at least in part.
I’m so glad you’re concerned about suicide deaths in Japan. Cultural scripts and issues absolutely impact death methods and rates. In the US, our gun culture, individualism, and lack of social support all directly impact our suicide death rates. Only someone who prioritizes guns over children would insist that guns aren’t 50% of the problem in the US.
Gun prohibition laws are of no effect or value in the United States or most other countries, for the simple reason that law abiders (obeyers) — ONCE AGAIN — are not the issue here.
It’s the lawless who feel they are either not subject to the law, or exempt from obedience to it. Many of these are either mentally unstable, ill, or have rap sheets (criminal records), and usually for acts of violence against persons, often women.
People like THAT will find a way to get handguns to do their damage, even if there is a handgun prohibition in place.
I submit New York City, London, England, and all of Australia and New Zealand as Exhibits #1, #2, #3, and #4, each of whom experienced a surge in handgun violence when the law-abiding were (yes) legally RAPED of their lawful means of legal and legitimate self-protection, and thrown to the two-legged wolves, resulting in a significant increase of violent crime.
This murder wave went all the way, up to and including the assassination of the Deputy Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police, a crime that went unsolved for years, until a key break allowed the perp to be arrested and finally be held accountable.
It won’t bring him back; but justice was finally put in place.
Again, I leave with one thought-provoking question: When was the last time you saw a handgun unlock itself, walk under its own power, lock and load, and then go on a mass killing spree?!?
NEVER! That’s because guns (handguns, rifles, shotguns, and other firearms) don’t kill people. PEOPLE DO!! They only use firearms as a means to an end, and the Gun haters use them as a bogeyman of convenience.
After all, with so many stabbings in London, little Short Squat Mayor banned knives (foolish, right?). Next thing you know, he’ll make it illegal to make a ham and Swiss on wheat bread sandwich!
Talk about going overboard. And thus, from a retired high school United States History and Contemporary American Government teacher.
The Second Amendment: The insurance policy against tyranny that allows the other freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution (D&C 101:80) to remain in place.
The United States Constitution, Copyright 1787. Accept no substitutes. Despite its flaws, it still — 226 years later — remains the envy of the world. ***