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There's a common argument that if you ban guns, people will just find another way to kill themselves, so why bother? And no doubt this is true of the sufficiently determined suicidals. But the convenience factor of firearms (and other methods) does appear to play a big role. The example of gas ovens in the UK is illustrative:
In other words, there was no replacement effect: people didn't immediately switch over from inhaling oven fumes to another method. There's a non-negligible chance that Sylvia Plath would have lived to a ripe old age if the UK had made the switch to natural gas a few years sooner.
Another example is here in Ireland, in which, although it's available over the counter, it's illegal to sell more than 24 tablets of paracetamol* in a single transaction. For years I thought this was silly: what's stopping you from driving or walking to three pharmacies or supermarkets to stock up on enough paracetamol (hell, even newsagents and corner shops sell it)? And obviously this is true for the sufficiently determined suicidals, about whom there's little we can do to stop them from killing themselves short of sectioning them. But adding in the trivial inconvenience of forcing people to go to multiple different shops does appear to serve as an obstacle: by the time you've walked into your third newsagent in an hour, you might well be thinking to yourself "Do I really want to do this?"
Decades of psychological evidence strongly suggest that the vast majority of suicides are impulsive, opportunistic ones (perhaps even "cries for help" that were rather more efficacious than their user strictly intended), and that these suicides would not have occurred if not for the convenience and ease of use of the method employed. If someone is so determined to kill themselves that they voluntarily choose an extraordinarily painful method of doing so like hanging, I think it's fair to say there's little we can do about them. But on the margin, there are huge savings to be made among the less-than-maximally determined suicidals. In the counterfactual world where the US had banned guns ten years ago, I don't think that all of the people who killed themselves with firearms in our world would have instead hanged or drowned themselves. In fact, I don't think that even 50 or 25% of them would have done so.
I'm not arguing that this, in itself, is a persuasive argument in favour of banning guns, and can see the merits of both sides of the debate (particularly the "guns as a check against encroaching authoritarianism" argument advanced by many, including Handwaving Freakoutery, formerly of these parts). But the causal role that guns play in suicide owing to their convenience factor is something that opponents must take seriously. "If we're going to ban guns to stop people from killing themselves, why not go the whole hog and ban ropes to stop people from hanging themselves?" is not a serious argument, for the reasons outlined above.
*A.k.a. acetaminophen, sold under the brand name Tylenol among others.
I agree with your argument overall, but I think hanging is not as painful as you say that it is. It's just some pressure for a few seconds and then lights out for the next 20 minutes while your body kicks around and tries to free itself. The real bother for the suicidal person there is that they need a good rope, they need to find a good spot that will support them and not let them come loose, they need to be able to tie a great knot, and they need to worry not about aesthetics of such a violent death. I imagine that these constraints are themselves large barriers to depressives who have little willpower for planning in the first place.
The thought sometimes strikes me of unique ways to commit suicide. Ones I have wondered about:
You never hear about people doing either one of these. I don't know if that's because it just doesn't work or because nobody goes for them. The apple seed one would be painful, anyway, and there are probably more effective drugs out there...
I once had the same thought about eating cherries in bulk.
I vaguely recall some movie where this happens, a guy heats shells on a frying pan.
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I must try so very hard to not get nerd-sniped again into an argument about convenient household or pharmaceutical techniques to kill people quickly and easily.
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Re. hanging, I did a deep dive into the biomechanics of hanging on a morbid curiosity kick a while back. My conclusion was that (to not put too fine a point to it) it's possible to set things up such that only a relatively painless blood choke is applied and conciousness is lost in 8-10 seconds, but the standard method of hanging puts much more pressure on the trachea and inconsistent pressure on the carotid arteries, causing a far more painful and likely drawn-out death.
Makes sense. I've done Jiu-Jitsu for a long time and whilst I've never been out-out I've spent a lot of time being choked in various guises and if somebody's got a clean bite and catches a blood choke perfectly it's blackness oncoming almost instantly. But also plenty of chokes where it's see-sawing the line the whole time and can be minutes of awkwardness
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That was what I said above. I never disputed that guns increase suicides.
Right, but I think your post contained something of an elision. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that people with terminal illnesses but also people who were dealt a bad hand by life should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless suicide.
While I can understand the argument that people who will never be able to live a normal life (people with severe developmental disorders such that they will never be able to support themselves, paedophiles, the constitutionally unfuckable etc.) should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless death if they want it, the point I was making about guns is that they facilitate opportunistic suicides among people who don't meet this description who find themselves in a state of intense but temporary distress. And I don't think there's any effective means of separating wheat from chaff. When guns are widely available, you allow the unemployable and unlovable to undergo a quick, painless death - but you also enable a hard-working, decent man who just lost his job to top himself when he would have thought better of it had the gun not been right there in front of him.
The implication that the only people to kill themselves are people who cannot function in ordinary society and want to exit from an agreement they never personally assented to is, in my view, not supported by the best evidence from the social sciences. Every year, lots of people kill themselves who would not have done otherwise if not for the ease of accessibility. An obvious sign of this is the fact that three professions which consistently rank among the most suicidal in every Western country are doctors, dentists and veterinarians. Is it because these professions are uniquely depressing, or attract a particularly dysfunctional class of person? Or is it because all of the people working in these fields have easy access to morphine and other painkillers?
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Imagine you hate your life. Every day you go home from your job, stare off into space, and drink a ton of alcohol. You aren't particularly suicidal, but you have fleeting thoughts at times, you still function...with the drink anyway.
One day the thoughts are a little less fleeting...you think to yourself but shit, I don't live on a busy road and getting hit by a car sounds like a lot. How would I even hang myself? Stabbing myself? Seems hard.
The thoughts pass, as they always do.
But if there was a gun? "Well fuck it." Lights out.
I've seen a shocking number of patients who managed to shoot themselves in the head and think it was an oopsy.
So yes limiting access to lethal means is an important part of standard of care and improves outcomes.
As people have pointed out, the crime rate of people who legally carry is extremely low. Your scary scenarios do not describe reality.
He wasn’t talking about crime- making it a crime to commit suicide would be pointless. He was talking about suicide.
The standard justification for criminalizing suicide is not to punish the survivor, assuming they survive. It is, or at least I've heard it claimed, so that the police have a legal pretext to intervene or break down the door and stop them.
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To be clear I am specifically talking about the evidence based way in which increased access to firearms increases suicides. I do not support restricting gun rights in the general population on this grounds, but it is still a real problem.
You can acknowledge that guns have an impact on suicides and say this is not a reason to restrict rights.
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To be fair, the fact that Costco (et al) sell giant containers of acetaminophen is kinda scary to me. It's substantially more dangerous than naproxen (also available in that size). The 24-count restriction sounds pretty reasonable to me.
It's a piece of legislation I fully support. Some Irish legislation carries a whiff of nanny-stateism, but I really can't imagine why a household would ever need more than 24 paracetamol pills in a week. I think implementing something similar in the US would be a no-brainer, especially when you consider paracetamol poisoning is the leading cause of death by acute liver failure. I assume a significant portion of that is accidental: because it's an OTC drug, a lot of people severely underestimate how toxic it is. My dad (PhD in organic chemistry) says there's no way it would have been made available OTC if it was discovered today. I always urge people to use ibuprofen instead when possible.
Four people with headaches easily covers that. And 24 pills is still enough to kill you, painfully. Making the vast majority of people who just want to keep APAP around the house go more often to the store and pay a higher per-unit price just to slightly inconvenience those who want to die isn't reasonable. Nor is it reasonable to go full retard like with pseudoephederine and have a registry to make sure no one is buying a fatal dose by going to multiple pharmacies.
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