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New York attorney general seeks to dissolve NRA in suit accusing gun rights group of wide-ranging fraud and self-dealing


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Yeah I wouldn't include suicide by gun along with mass shootings, for example, when talking and gun violence. Obviously suicide by gun (or anything really) is horrible and should be talked about, but I would separate it as its own statistic. Violence, to me, is more about causing harm to other people. 

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Personally...

 

1) I am not inclined to slice metrics around gun deaths in any way that reduces them as a matter of principle

2) Physical self-harm is a violent act, suicide does not get a pass simply because it's final

 

20K+ Americans kill themselves every year with a firearm, more than half of all suicides in the US are firearm related. It's a public health crisis. Refusing to acknowledge this as "violence" feels like refusing to call addiction a "disorder" because people often choose to engage with whatever they're addicted to. The hair is too fine for me to bother splitting it.

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2 hours ago, Kal-El814 said:

Personally...

 

1) I am not inclined to slice metrics around gun deaths in any way that reduces them as a matter of principle

2) Physical self-harm is a violent act, suicide does not get a pass simply because it's final

 

20K+ Americans kill themselves every year with a firearm, more than half of all suicides in the US are firearm related. It's a public health crisis. Refusing to acknowledge this as "violence" feels like refusing to call addiction a "disorder" because people often choose to engage with whatever they're addicted to. The hair is too fine for me to bother splitting it.

I see both sides of it. I kind-of agree with our Emperor above. Suicide is terrible, but I'm not sure the choice to end your life should be considered the same as murders in gun statistics. Violence against oneself is a choice, being murdered is not. Committing a violent act against yourself is very different than against someone else.

 

Tgat said, it’s not something I would get in a huff about. 
 

I am a lifetime member of the NRA. they had a deal where new lifetime members got a handgun some years ago, so I bought memberships for myself, my grandfather, and my wife. I don’t want to see them destroyed, but I do want to see their leadership changed. More actual activism and less political theater would be nice. 

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I believe that suicide should absolutely count on gun violence statistics.  Plenty of studies and real world examples have shown suicide to be a deeply impulsive act.  Even a modest inconvenience will stop a lot of people from attempting the act.  There's a really good New York Times article from a while back about this:

 

The Urge to End It - Understanding Suicide

 

It gives some interesting examples, like how in the 60's and 70's Britain changed from coal gas to natural gas.  Coal gas asphyxiation had become a major method of suicide before then due to its ease, relative painlessness, and being in essentially every modern home.  Once the change was made and asphyxiation became much more difficult, it essentially disappeared as a method of suicide.  The suicide rate dropped, and has never gone back up.  By removing the easily accessible method, the people who would have killed themselves simply didn't.  There's even an example of twin bridges where a suicide barrier was put in place on only one.  People objected to the cost and argued that people would simply walk the extra hundred feet to the other bridge and jump off there.  The barrier went up, suicides on the bridge down, and the jump rate and the other bridge didn't budge.  Why?  The first bridge had a waist high fence, and the second bridge had a chest high railing.  An extra foot of climbing, the effort and time required to complete the task, was enough to make people not do it.

 

Easy access to a gun absolutely 100% contributes heavily to the suicide rate in the US.  It's not like every single gun suicide would go away if guns magically disappeared because not every single suicide is purely spur of the moment impulse,  but a shocking number of them would.  

 

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10 minutes ago, LazyPiranha said:

I believe that suicide should absolutely count on gun violence statistics.  Plenty of studies and real world examples have shown suicide to be a deeply impulsive act.  Even a modest inconvenience will stop a lot of people from attempting the act.  There's a really good New York Times article from a while back about this:

 

The Urge to End It - Understanding Suicide

 

It gives some interesting examples, like how in the 60's and 70's Britain changed from coal gas to natural gas.  Coal gas asphyxiation had become a major method of suicide before then due to its ease, relative painlessness, and being in essentially every modern home.  Once the change was made and asphyxiation became much more difficult, it essentially disappeared as a method of suicide.  The suicide rate dropped, and has never gone back up.  By removing the easily accessible method, the people who would have killed themselves simply didn't.  There's even an example of twin bridges where a suicide barrier was put in place on only one.  People objected to the cost and argued that people would simply walk the extra hundred feet to the other bridge and jump off there.  The barrier went up, suicides on the bridge down, and the jump rate and the other bridge didn't budge.  Why?  The first bridge had a waist high fence, and the second bridge had a chest high railing.  An extra foot of climbing, the effort and time required to complete the task, was enough to make people not do it.

 

Easy access to a gun absolutely 100% contributes heavily to the suicide rate in the US.  It's not like every single gun suicide would go away if guns magically disappeared because not every single suicide is purely spur of the moment impulse,  but a shocking number of them would.  

 

 

This. I think many people forget that suicide is often an act of passion. We already know that fewer guns lead to fewer murders, but nobody for a second believes that just because there are no guns around doesn't mean people just magically stop fighting or hating each other. It's just that those confrontations when faced with a very easy to use murder weapon will often escalate in ways they won't without them. The same applies to suicide.

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