‘So many people are struggling’
It’s been a bleak year. Now, experts are bracing for another crisis: Gun deaths by suicide
SPOKANE, Wash. — Shanna Torp has never been uneasy around guns. Her father, a retired trucker, kept a gun in the cab when he was on the road. When Torp, a debt collector from Post Falls, Idaho, goes camping, she takes a rifle to ward off cougars and bears.
But after her mother died following heart surgery, her 80year-old father became despondent, Torp told suicide prevention workers lastautumnat agunshow in Spokane. There had been several suicides in Post Falls, she said. She added pointedly: “Andhe’s got quite a few guns.”
Torp has reason toworry. Gun violence kills about 40,000 Americans each year, but while public attention has focused on mass shootings, murders and accidental gun deaths, these account for little more than one-third of the nation’s firearms fatalities. The majority of gun deaths are suicides — and just over half of suicides involve guns.
According to national health statistics, 24,432 Americans used guns to kill themselves in 2018, up from 19,392 in 2010.
People who kill themselves in this way are usually those with ready access to firearms: gun owners and their family members. Gun owners are not more suicidal than people who don’t own guns, but attempts with guns are more likely to be fatal.
Now, nearly a year after the coronavirus pandemic began, unleashing a tide of economic dislocation and despair, experts are bracing for a rise in suicides. Gun sales have risen steadily since March, and as shutdowns aimed at containing the virus have disrupted lives and led to social isolation, studies have shown an increase in anxiety and suicidal ideation.
“So many people are struggling right now,” said Jennifer Stuber, an associate professor of social work who helped found the University of Washington’s Forefront Suicide Prevention center. “The indicators are that a perfect storm is about to hit.”
She noted that people who purchase guns to protect themselves from civil unrest and a possible rise in crime “may actually be incurring more potential risk in terms of harm that can come to their family.”
The concern about suicides
has led to an unusual alliance between suicide prevention advocates and gun-rights proponents; together they are devising new strategies to prevent suicide in a population committed to the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms.
Gun shows across the country had started giving suicide prevention booths space at their events before the coronavirus appeared. Now, theNational Shooting Sports Foundation, a tradeassociation for the firearms industry, carries a
suicide prevention video on the homepage of its website, and invites suicide experts to give talks at online events.
Firearms retailers hand out postcards that carry suicide prevention hotline numbers and list the telltale signs of depression, including changes in sleep habits, sudden weight loss and alcohol abuse. Posters urge customers to “Have a brave conversation” with a friend if they’re worried. The messages urge gun enthusiasts to keep their firearms locked, to store guns and bullets separately — andto offer tostore firearmsfor a fellow gun owner who is going through a life crisis.
Retailers and gun-range operators are learning to ask questions of the new customer who doesn’t seem to know much about, or to be interested in, the gun he wants to buy. (Most suicides, especially gun suicides, are carried out by men.) Many gun shops have stopped providing loaner firearms to new customers to try out, as people have used these to kill themselves at ranges.
Jacquelyn Clark, owner of Bristlecone Shooting outside Denver, has changed her loaner policies, but said she still worried that customers could develop depression or dementia and do something rash. “That’s what keeps me up at night,” she said.
Many gun owners are unaware that gun suicides outnumber all other gun deaths.
Clark Aposhian, chair of a lobbying group for gun owners in Utah, where suicides outnumber homicides by a factor of eight, said he did not believe the numbers when he first heard them: “Howdidwe not know?”
Aposhian blamedthe mediafor hiding the truth and fostering an impression that most gun deaths are murders.
Some suicide prevention experts wonder if there isn’t a contradiction in working with groups like the National Rifle Association, National Shooting Sports Foundation and Second Amendment Foundation. These groups do not support many measures that public health officials have called for, including universal background checks, mandatory waiting periods and so-called red flag laws.
But Kyleanne Hunter, the former vice president of programs for Brady (formerly the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence), noted that several guncontrol groups count gun owners among their volunteers.
“We’re not going to crack this
nut if we isolate gun owners from the conversation,” said Hunter, a Marine Corps veteran.
Brett Bass served in the Marines, where he became a rifle sharpshooter and pistol expert. A certified marksmanship instructor, he owns six handguns and four rifles.
But Bass, who is 37, has also known several men, including a fellow Marine with whom he served in Afghanistan, who killed themselves, and he has stored guns for close friends when they were severely depressed.
Bass works full time for Safer Homes, Suicide Aware, a statefunded suicide prevention program in Washington state led by the Forefront Suicide Prevention center.
Since the pandemic started, the organization has rolled back inperson outreach at events like the Wes Knodel Gun & Knife Showat the fairgrounds in Spokane, where Bass had a table in the corner late last year. He was surrounded by displays of firearms: antique bayonets and rifles laid out on zebra skin, historical pistols that look
like props from oldWesterns, and rows and rows of boxed ammunition.
At Bass’ booth, a poster implored visitors: “Stop by and have a conversation that may save a life.”
The incentives were free merchandise: lockboxes for medication, high-end safes for handguns and expensive gun locks that could disable a shotgun or rifle. (All of the gear was donated by Boeing.)
To anyone who would listen, Bass explained that suicidewas an impulsive act. Locking up a firearm could put the brakes on the impulse.
“It stops youfor 10 minutes, and that gives you enough time to maybechangeyour mind,” he said.
He and Sabrina Votava, a local volunteer, hit the key messages quickly: Be alert to signs that a friend may be depressed. Ask the person if they are contemplating suicide.
If they say they are troubled, offer to take possession of their guns until the crisis passes. It’s not true that someone contemplating suicide will simply choose another method.
“People think, ‘There nothing I can do about it. If someone wants to commit suicide, I can’t stop them,’ ” said Votava, who lost two brothers to suicide. “But there’s a part of us that is wired for life, and if the attempt is aborted, the natural wiring kicks in.”
Public health experts liken the approach to taking the keys away from a friend who might otherwise drive home drunk.
“If you’re on a diet, do youwant to have ice creamin your freezer?” Stuber said. “Clinicians will tell you, what’s most important is to remove the firearm from the individual. That person is in terrible pain, and they fixate on getting out of that pain. We’ve got to disrupt that.”
Stuber became interested in working with gun sellers after experiencing a devastating personal loss in 2011, when her 40-year-old husband, who was in the throes of a mental health crisis, killed himself with a gun he had just purchased. The couple, who had two children, ages 1 and 5, had never owned any guns.
“He passed the legal background check, and a couple of hours after he picked up the firearm, he ended his life,” Stuber said. “I realized the person who sold him the gun was one of the last people to seemy late husband alive.”
Most gun suicides are carried
out by people who are longtime gun owners; less than 10% are carried out by someone who recently purchased the gun.
In either case, Stuber says, firearm retailers are important allies in suicide prevention efforts. A study she co-authored found that once gun retailers learned about the risks to their community, they were more willing to get involved and integrate information about suicide prevention into firearm safety training.
Aposhian is a prime example. When his own research confirmed what a local legislator, Steve Eliason, had told him— that 85% of gun deaths in Utah were suicides— he had “an epiphany of sorts,” he said.
“That was our family, our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers,” Aposhian said. “Utah has very permissive gun laws, but we also have a very low homicide rate. What we didn’t realize was we have a huge suicide rate.”
Some of the earliest efforts to engage gun retailers in suicide prevention started inNewHampshire in 2009, when state officials who were reviewing suicide reports noticed that within one week, three people had visited the same firearms store in Hooksett, purchased a gun and killed themselves.
“I was aghast,” said Ralph Demicco, who owned the store at the time. “We always prided ourselves as being a socially responsible gun store.”
Years earlier, when Demicco was just an employee at the store, he had reluctantly sold a gun to a woman who radiated unhappiness.
But the store owner’s wife knew her and vouched for her.
“Would you believe,” Demicco said, “the next morning, that same lady, to whom I sold a gun, took her 7-year-old daughter, drove to a remote location, and killed her daughter and herself.”
In the years that followed, Demicco said, he took action that he believed prevented suicides on dozens of occasions.
In one case, he said, a welldressed woman came in, walked straight to the counter, pointed to a handgun and said shewanted to buy it, without ever making eye contact with him.
“I said to her, ‘Should you be buying a gun?’ ” Demicco recalled.
The woman started crying, he said, and confided that she had just been discharged from the hospital. He encouraged her to go home, and called her doctor on her behalf.