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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25874 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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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.

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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