I’d say that the immediate effectiveness of a shotgun blast to the head means that suicide by firearm is harder to save someone from than from an overdose. Narcan is ineffective against buckshot.

Everyone is a responsible gun owner until they aren’t. It’s all anecdotal. Just like how every time there’s a news story about a person that went psycho and murdered their family- there’s always an interview with a neighbor that says they were the most mellow person they ever knew.

ALL gun owners think they’re the responsible one, and the bad one are irresponsible. It’s how they’re able to rationalize the ideology that guns are good.

Personally, as someone who thinks guns can be dangerous to everyone in anyone’s hands (even the most experienced and safe can have a heart attack or find themselves in some other situation where being safe with their gun might suddenly be lower on the priority list than others around you might like it to be), I don’t like including suicides in that stat because it makes it easier to disqualify.

It’s just the way our minds work. If one has a position they believe in and some conflicting information comes up, unless they want to believe otherwise, they’ll latch on to any angle they can to disqualify it.

Including suicides makes the stat very easy to disqualify. They can be painful but they aren’t scary and don’t seem random when they aren’t close to home, plus that whole line of thought that they’d just find another way if they didn’t have guns.

Though, also personally, I don’t see why accidental gun deaths should be disqualified. If anything, they are worse than deliberate murders and assaults, because that “find another way” argument applies to deliberate attacks but doesn’t to accidental shootings. Accidental shootings are 100% “the only reason anyone died here was because there was a gun present”.

Suicides aren’t avoidable in the same way as gang bangers shooting each other in the streets

My dogs are howling like they heard something. Funny, I didn’t hear anything.

While it’s true that some of the people that kill themselves with a gun would find other ways, the majority wouldn’t. MOST suicides are spur of the moment, and having quick access to a deadly weapon makes those attempts far more successful. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-ownership-associated-with-much-higher-suicide-risk.html

Damn you’re cold. That’s 21,782 people’s lives we’ll never get back. Just this year. And we’re going to sit here debating whether their life is worth including.

For me, it’s not about fear it’s about empathy. Seeing that number I didn’t think “oh no I’m going to get shot.” I thought, “that’s a lot of lives lost and families and friends impacted for the rest of their lives. A lot of permanent loss for the country. How can we have a meaningful impact that number?”

Proof? no, if there were proof our data would simply have to be better than it is. Are there a lot of statistical and geographical tendencies working against this data that are easily pointed out, yes.

The biggest ones: suicides usually occur in places where the body will be discovered and people who commit suicide tend to want to be found.

Homocides tend to be covered up more often or occur in more remote locations; lots of unsolved homocides end up as missing persons, especially in less dense areas. A few are staged as suicides or accidents.

So there’s absolutely a tendency for the data to skew in certain directions. This isn’t even addressing more chaotic problems liks a lack a lack of qualified coroners, incentives to not charge police who just riddle people with bullets, etc.