NC would make the 11th state to go permitless or constitutional carry. Did not know about that one.

(06-15-2016 01:37 AM)john01992 Wrote:  

(06-14-2016 12:33 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(06-12-2016 09:38 PM)john01992 Wrote:  if you had done real research into this you would realize that the bold part is a terrible way to look at suicide rates. they are highly affected by geography, climate, availability of method (guns), economics, age, and gender. look at men and their suicide rate being 5x higher than women but women are significantly more likely to attempt suicide than men. which opens the even more bizarre issue of method let along the simple rates. if you can see that much of an impact on gender do you really think gun usage is the end all be all? you have to be the most closed minded fool one can possibly be in order to not see that.

I think there is actually a reasonable and rational discussion to be had here, if you'd quit being a jerk long enough for it to happen. I'll make one more attempt in good faith.

OK, I agree that suicide is a complex issue that is affected by a number of factors. Suppose your argument that if you take away guns, suicides go down rather than simply resorting to another means. Then, you should see higher suicide rates in the US, where guns are more prevalent, than in other countries with similar characteristics with the other variables. The US rate is 12.1 per 100,000. In France, a similar country but with much stricter gun laws, it's 12.3. In Belgium, it's 14.2. In Sweden it's 11.1, in Austria it's 11.5, in Ireland it's 11.0, in Poland it's 16.1, in Hungary it's 19.1. They all have much more restrictive gun laws, and correspondingly lower rates of gun suicide. But they have offsetting much higher rates of non-gun suicide. Which of those factors explains that? Geography, gender, climate, economics, what? The obvious explanation is "if they don't have guns, they find another way." Occam's Razor. Do you have a different explanation? Look at Australia, the total suicide rate is 10.6. Their total gun death rate is about 1, and suicides would be some subset of that, so their non-gun suicide rate is at least 9 and probably 10. Our gun suicide rate is 6, meaning our non-gun rate is also about 6. So why is Australia's non-gun suicide rate so much higher than ours? "If they don't have guns, they find another way," would obviously explain it. Occam's Razor. You say that's not the case. So what does explain it? You keep talking about how it's such a complex question and how all these factors affect. Fine. Which factors affect it, and how?

One other point about suicides, Alaska has a rate that is higher than the US as a whole. Iceland (14.0) and Finland (14.8) also have rates higher than the US, and as you noted so does Greenland. Hmm, see any commonality there? It's definitely not guns. But long dark winters and isolation are common attributes. Maybe there's something there.

I do agree that gun suicides are a particular problem for one reason. Sometimes the perp wants to go out in a blaze of glory and take a bunch of folks with him. That's a heck of a lot easier to do with a gun than by making 100 people take suicide pills, James Jones notwithstanding.

One other point. I hate to bring this up in a way, because your standard response would be to start screaming racism and ignore the facts. But I think this is very important. Our homicide rate among whites looks a lot like western Europe, the high end of western Europe, but nevertheless in that range. If we could get the total number down to that level, I think we would all be much happier. Our homicide rate among African-Americans looks a lot like sub-Saharan Africa. Our homicide rate among Hispanics looks a lot like Latin America. Before you go screaming racist, think about what are the commonalities--poverty, poor education, high occurrence rates for petty crimes, some degree of disenchantment with/disrespect for authority. That's why when I talk about ways to reduce gun violence, things like legalizing or decriminalizing at least marijuana and possibly other drugs, and restructuring of our welfare system, are on my list.

The odd thing about the death statistics by race/ethnicity is that the suicide statistics break just the other way. African-American and Hispanic suicide rates are in line with other countries with much stricter gun laws, but white suicides are an epidemic. And that's with the same gun laws applying to all three, obviously. What's going on there? Does that somehow tie in to the comparative overall suicide rates discussed above?

So what do I think we should do:
1) A gun license similar to a driver's license, which would be required to buy or possess guns or ammo; tied to the criminal justice database, like driver's licenses are tied to the traffic violation database
2) Stricter penalties for gun crimes, and enforcement of those penalties
3) Legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana and possibly other drugs, to cut off a revenue source for gangs, break the cycle where a teen goes into prison for simple possession and comes out trained to be a hardened criminal, free up jail space so violent criminals can serve full term, and free up police assets to go after gangs
4) A war on gangs, on all fronts, with major assets deployed in the effort
5) Identifying and addressing the reasons for high rates of gun violence in the African-American and Hispanic communities
6) A major effort in the mental health community to identify and manage suicidal tendencies, particularly among whites, since that's where the biggest problem seems to lie.

Do you want to have a meaningful discussion, or do you just want to keep screaming the same ad hominems over and over?

it's as if you try not to listen to what I am saying. It's the same story with you. no matter how much the same point is made it doesn't seem to register.

the point is that guns in suicide is such a small part of a massive issue that you can't compare them among countries. population density, economics, age demographics, and even climate are all massive factors as well. you pretend that we live in a world where all those factors are the same and thus we can use the concept of guns to measure this. look at SK where that teacher committed suicide simply because of the ferry incident. or some safety officer at a concert in SK where people fell though a groundgate not surprising those two events happened and SK also happens to have a massive suicide rate. you are totally clueless on this topic. what we have to go on is 20K suicides a year from guns. with guns removed that is 20k lives on the table following a very real trend that a lot of them will not move on to another method.

these two points ruin your argument and yet you ignore them because they are inconvenient for you to acknowledge.

the argument is that sure we may be at 11.0 and some other country is at 12.0 but without guns those countries are still at 12.0 and for us that number drops when guns are removed. otherwise (if you refuse to acknowledge this) you are claiming that you are single handedly smarter than the entire field of psychology.

In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.

the suicide argument is silly, people will off themselves no matter what. Bring in the fact that some liberal states are making suicide legal, your whole argument goes out the window. In 2000, suicides were only 1.2% of all deaths, 60% of those suicides were committed by some type of gun, so you are looking at less than 1%...

(06-15-2016 01:37 AM)john01992 Wrote:  it's as if you try not to listen to what I am saying. It's the same story with you. no matter how much the same point is made it doesn't seem to register.

No. I pretty much read everything you say. It's just that what you say doesn't make any valid points, except perhaps in your own mind.

Speaking of not paying attention to what I am saying, I've laid out policy proposals that I support, that I believe would have a meaningful impact, and would do so with minimal intended or unintended harmful consequences. If you want to have a reasonable discussion around those or other proposals, I'm up for that. If you're just going to keep beating the same dead horse, no thanks. I'm not just ranting like you, I'm actually proposing tangible steps which I believe would address the problem, and you refuse to engage in that discussion.

Quote:the point is that guns in suicide is such a small part of a massive issue that you can't compare them among countries. population density, economics, age demographics, and even climate are all massive factors as well. you pretend that we live in a world where all those factors are the same and thus we can use the concept of guns to measure this.

OK, fine, there are other factors. I agree with that. Which ones account for the trends noted? I'm not pretending that those factors are the same. I'm saying identify the ones that aren't, and explain how they impact the outcome. You haven't done that. You're cherry picking anecdotal data to support your point, while ignoring data that don't. By the way, I'm not comparing gun suicides by countries, other than incidentally. I'm comparing total suicides by country.

As for your point about contradicting the whole psychology profession, I'd like to see some cites there. I believe there is at best a mix of opinion. And this is not a subject unknown to me. My mother was a psychologist who specialized in suicide prevention among teen-agers, mostly drug abusers. So although it is not my field, it is one with which I have discussed quite a bit with someone whose field it clearly was.

(06-15-2016 09:22 AM)UTSAMarineVet09 Wrote:  

(06-15-2016 01:37 AM)john01992 Wrote:  

(06-14-2016 12:33 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(06-12-2016 09:38 PM)john01992 Wrote:  if you had done real research into this you would realize that the bold part is a terrible way to look at suicide rates. they are highly affected by geography, climate, availability of method (guns), economics, age, and gender. look at men and their suicide rate being 5x higher than women but women are significantly more likely to attempt suicide than men. which opens the even more bizarre issue of method let along the simple rates. if you can see that much of an impact on gender do you really think gun usage is the end all be all? you have to be the most closed minded fool one can possibly be in order to not see that.

I think there is actually a reasonable and rational discussion to be had here, if you'd quit being a jerk long enough for it to happen. I'll make one more attempt in good faith.

OK, I agree that suicide is a complex issue that is affected by a number of factors. Suppose your argument that if you take away guns, suicides go down rather than simply resorting to another means. Then, you should see higher suicide rates in the US, where guns are more prevalent, than in other countries with similar characteristics with the other variables. The US rate is 12.1 per 100,000. In France, a similar country but with much stricter gun laws, it's 12.3. In Belgium, it's 14.2. In Sweden it's 11.1, in Austria it's 11.5, in Ireland it's 11.0, in Poland it's 16.1, in Hungary it's 19.1. They all have much more restrictive gun laws, and correspondingly lower rates of gun suicide. But they have offsetting much higher rates of non-gun suicide. Which of those factors explains that? Geography, gender, climate, economics, what? The obvious explanation is "if they don't have guns, they find another way." Occam's Razor. Do you have a different explanation? Look at Australia, the total suicide rate is 10.6. Their total gun death rate is about 1, and suicides would be some subset of that, so their non-gun suicide rate is at least 9 and probably 10. Our gun suicide rate is 6, meaning our non-gun rate is also about 6. So why is Australia's non-gun suicide rate so much higher than ours? "If they don't have guns, they find another way," would obviously explain it. Occam's Razor. You say that's not the case. So what does explain it? You keep talking about how it's such a complex question and how all these factors affect. Fine. Which factors affect it, and how?

One other point about suicides, Alaska has a rate that is higher than the US as a whole. Iceland (14.0) and Finland (14.8) also have rates higher than the US, and as you noted so does Greenland. Hmm, see any commonality there? It's definitely not guns. But long dark winters and isolation are common attributes. Maybe there's something there.

I do agree that gun suicides are a particular problem for one reason. Sometimes the perp wants to go out in a blaze of glory and take a bunch of folks with him. That's a heck of a lot easier to do with a gun than by making 100 people take suicide pills, James Jones notwithstanding.

One other point. I hate to bring this up in a way, because your standard response would be to start screaming racism and ignore the facts. But I think this is very important. Our homicide rate among whites looks a lot like western Europe, the high end of western Europe, but nevertheless in that range. If we could get the total number down to that level, I think we would all be much happier. Our homicide rate among African-Americans looks a lot like sub-Saharan Africa. Our homicide rate among Hispanics looks a lot like Latin America. Before you go screaming racist, think about what are the commonalities--poverty, poor education, high occurrence rates for petty crimes, some degree of disenchantment with/disrespect for authority. That's why when I talk about ways to reduce gun violence, things like legalizing or decriminalizing at least marijuana and possibly other drugs, and restructuring of our welfare system, are on my list.

The odd thing about the death statistics by race/ethnicity is that the suicide statistics break just the other way. African-American and Hispanic suicide rates are in line with other countries with much stricter gun laws, but white suicides are an epidemic. And that's with the same gun laws applying to all three, obviously. What's going on there? Does that somehow tie in to the comparative overall suicide rates discussed above?

So what do I think we should do:
1) A gun license similar to a driver's license, which would be required to buy or possess guns or ammo; tied to the criminal justice database, like driver's licenses are tied to the traffic violation database
2) Stricter penalties for gun crimes, and enforcement of those penalties
3) Legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana and possibly other drugs, to cut off a revenue source for gangs, break the cycle where a teen goes into prison for simple possession and comes out trained to be a hardened criminal, free up jail space so violent criminals can serve full term, and free up police assets to go after gangs
4) A war on gangs, on all fronts, with major assets deployed in the effort
5) Identifying and addressing the reasons for high rates of gun violence in the African-American and Hispanic communities
6) A major effort in the mental health community to identify and manage suicidal tendencies, particularly among whites, since that's where the biggest problem seems to lie.

Do you want to have a meaningful discussion, or do you just want to keep screaming the same ad hominems over and over?

it's as if you try not to listen to what I am saying. It's the same story with you. no matter how much the same point is made it doesn't seem to register.

the point is that guns in suicide is such a small part of a massive issue that you can't compare them among countries. population density, economics, age demographics, and even climate are all massive factors as well. you pretend that we live in a world where all those factors are the same and thus we can use the concept of guns to measure this. look at SK where that teacher committed suicide simply because of the ferry incident. or some safety officer at a concert in SK where people fell though a groundgate not surprising those two events happened and SK also happens to have a massive suicide rate. you are totally clueless on this topic. what we have to go on is 20K suicides a year from guns. with guns removed that is 20k lives on the table following a very real trend that a lot of them will not move on to another method.

these two points ruin your argument and yet you ignore them because they are inconvenient for you to acknowledge.

the argument is that sure we may be at 11.0 and some other country is at 12.0 but without guns those countries are still at 12.0 and for us that number drops when guns are removed. otherwise (if you refuse to acknowledge this) you are claiming that you are single handedly smarter than the entire field of psychology.

In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.

the suicide argument is silly, people will off themselves no matter what. Bring in the fact that some liberal states are making suicide legal, your whole argument goes out the window. In 2000, suicides were only 1.2% of all deaths, 60% of those suicides were committed by some type of gun, so you are looking at less than 1%...

10th leading causing of death, 20K, but hey that's nothing right?

(06-15-2016 09:28 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(06-15-2016 01:37 AM)john01992 Wrote:  it's as if you try not to listen to what I am saying. It's the same story with you. no matter how much the same point is made it doesn't seem to register.

No. I pretty much read everything you say. It's just that what you say doesn't make any valid points, except perhaps in your own mind.

Speaking of not paying attention to what I am saying, I've laid out policy proposals that I support, that I believe would have a meaningful impact, and would do so with minimal intended or unintended harmful consequences. If you want to have a reasonable discussion around those or other proposals, I'm up for that. If you're just going to keep beating the same dead horse, no thanks. I'm not just ranting like you, I'm actually proposing tangible steps which I believe would address the problem, and you refuse to engage in that discussion.

Quote:the point is that guns in suicide is such a small part of a massive issue that you can't compare them among countries. population density, economics, age demographics, and even climate are all massive factors as well. you pretend that we live in a world where all those factors are the same and thus we can use the concept of guns to measure this.

OK, fine, there are other factors. I agree with that. Which ones account for the trends noted? I'm not pretending that those factors are the same. I'm saying identify the ones that aren't, and explain how they impact the outcome. You haven't done that. You're cherry picking anecdotal data to support your point, while ignoring data that don't. By the way, I'm not comparing gun suicides by countries, other than incidentally. I'm comparing total suicides by country.

As for your point about contradicting the whole psychology profession, I'd like to see some cites there. I believe there is at best a mix of opinion. And this is not a subject unknown to me, my mother was a psychologist who specialized in suicide prevention among teen-agers, mostly drug abusers. So although it is not my field, it is one with which I have discussed quite a bit with someone whose field it clearly is.

In Northwest Washington stands a pretty neoclassical-style bridge named for one of the city’s most famous native sons, Duke Ellington. Running perpendicular to the Ellington, a stone’s throw away, is another bridge, the Taft. Both span Rock Creek, and even though they have virtually identical drops into the gorge below — about 125 feet — it is the Ellington that has always been notorious as Washington’s “suicide bridge.” By the 1980s, the four people who, on average, leapt from its stone balustrades each year accounted for half of all jumping suicides in the nation’s capital. The adjacent Taft, by contrast, averaged less than two.

After three people leapt from the Ellington in a single 10-day period in 1985, a consortium of civic groups lobbied for a suicide barrier to be erected on the span. Opponents to the plan, which included the National Trust for Historic Preservation, countered with the same argument that is made whenever a suicide barrier on a bridge or landmark building is proposed: that such barriers don’t really work, that those intent on killing themselves will merely go elsewhere. In the Ellington’s case, opponents had the added ammunition of pointing to the equally lethal Taft standing just yards away: if a barrier were placed on the Ellington, it was not at all hard to see exactly where thwarted jumpers would head.

Except the opponents were wrong. A study conducted five years after the Ellington barrier went up showed that while suicides at the Ellington were eliminated completely, the rate at the Taft barely changed, inching up from 1.7 to 2 deaths per year. What’s more, over the same five-year span, the total number of jumping suicides in Washington had decreased by 50 percent, or the precise percentage the Ellington once accounted for.

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RELATED COVERAGE

What makes looking at jumping suicides potentially instructive is that it is a method associated with a very high degree of impulsivity, and its victims often display few of the classic warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. In fact, jumpers have a lower history of prior suicide attempts, diagnosed mental illness (with the exception of schizophrenia) or drug and alcohol abuse than is found among those who die by less lethal methods, like taking pills or poison. Instead, many who choose this method seem to be drawn by a set of environmental cues that, together, offer three crucial ingredients: ease, speed and the certainty of death.

For what it's worth the New York, California, and Texas all have pretty low suicide rates compared to the rest of the nation. the highest suicide rates are all interior western states (wyoming, montana, etc)+ alaska.

(06-15-2016 09:31 AM)john01992 Wrote:  

(06-15-2016 09:22 AM)UTSAMarineVet09 Wrote:  

(06-15-2016 01:37 AM)john01992 Wrote:  

(06-14-2016 12:33 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(06-12-2016 09:38 PM)john01992 Wrote:  if you had done real research into this you would realize that the bold part is a terrible way to look at suicide rates. they are highly affected by geography, climate, availability of method (guns), economics, age, and gender. look at men and their suicide rate being 5x higher than women but women are significantly more likely to attempt suicide than men. which opens the even more bizarre issue of method let along the simple rates. if you can see that much of an impact on gender do you really think gun usage is the end all be all? you have to be the most closed minded fool one can possibly be in order to not see that.

I think there is actually a reasonable and rational discussion to be had here, if you'd quit being a jerk long enough for it to happen. I'll make one more attempt in good faith.

OK, I agree that suicide is a complex issue that is affected by a number of factors. Suppose your argument that if you take away guns, suicides go down rather than simply resorting to another means. Then, you should see higher suicide rates in the US, where guns are more prevalent, than in other countries with similar characteristics with the other variables. The US rate is 12.1 per 100,000. In France, a similar country but with much stricter gun laws, it's 12.3. In Belgium, it's 14.2. In Sweden it's 11.1, in Austria it's 11.5, in Ireland it's 11.0, in Poland it's 16.1, in Hungary it's 19.1. They all have much more restrictive gun laws, and correspondingly lower rates of gun suicide. But they have offsetting much higher rates of non-gun suicide. Which of those factors explains that? Geography, gender, climate, economics, what? The obvious explanation is "if they don't have guns, they find another way." Occam's Razor. Do you have a different explanation? Look at Australia, the total suicide rate is 10.6. Their total gun death rate is about 1, and suicides would be some subset of that, so their non-gun suicide rate is at least 9 and probably 10. Our gun suicide rate is 6, meaning our non-gun rate is also about 6. So why is Australia's non-gun suicide rate so much higher than ours? "If they don't have guns, they find another way," would obviously explain it. Occam's Razor. You say that's not the case. So what does explain it? You keep talking about how it's such a complex question and how all these factors affect. Fine. Which factors affect it, and how?

One other point about suicides, Alaska has a rate that is higher than the US as a whole. Iceland (14.0) and Finland (14.8) also have rates higher than the US, and as you noted so does Greenland. Hmm, see any commonality there? It's definitely not guns. But long dark winters and isolation are common attributes. Maybe there's something there.

I do agree that gun suicides are a particular problem for one reason. Sometimes the perp wants to go out in a blaze of glory and take a bunch of folks with him. That's a heck of a lot easier to do with a gun than by making 100 people take suicide pills, James Jones notwithstanding.

One other point. I hate to bring this up in a way, because your standard response would be to start screaming racism and ignore the facts. But I think this is very important. Our homicide rate among whites looks a lot like western Europe, the high end of western Europe, but nevertheless in that range. If we could get the total number down to that level, I think we would all be much happier. Our homicide rate among African-Americans looks a lot like sub-Saharan Africa. Our homicide rate among Hispanics looks a lot like Latin America. Before you go screaming racist, think about what are the commonalities--poverty, poor education, high occurrence rates for petty crimes, some degree of disenchantment with/disrespect for authority. That's why when I talk about ways to reduce gun violence, things like legalizing or decriminalizing at least marijuana and possibly other drugs, and restructuring of our welfare system, are on my list.

The odd thing about the death statistics by race/ethnicity is that the suicide statistics break just the other way. African-American and Hispanic suicide rates are in line with other countries with much stricter gun laws, but white suicides are an epidemic. And that's with the same gun laws applying to all three, obviously. What's going on there? Does that somehow tie in to the comparative overall suicide rates discussed above?

So what do I think we should do:
1) A gun license similar to a driver's license, which would be required to buy or possess guns or ammo; tied to the criminal justice database, like driver's licenses are tied to the traffic violation database
2) Stricter penalties for gun crimes, and enforcement of those penalties
3) Legalizing or decriminalizing marijuana and possibly other drugs, to cut off a revenue source for gangs, break the cycle where a teen goes into prison for simple possession and comes out trained to be a hardened criminal, free up jail space so violent criminals can serve full term, and free up police assets to go after gangs
4) A war on gangs, on all fronts, with major assets deployed in the effort
5) Identifying and addressing the reasons for high rates of gun violence in the African-American and Hispanic communities
6) A major effort in the mental health community to identify and manage suicidal tendencies, particularly among whites, since that's where the biggest problem seems to lie.

Do you want to have a meaningful discussion, or do you just want to keep screaming the same ad hominems over and over?

it's as if you try not to listen to what I am saying. It's the same story with you. no matter how much the same point is made it doesn't seem to register.

the point is that guns in suicide is such a small part of a massive issue that you can't compare them among countries. population density, economics, age demographics, and even climate are all massive factors as well. you pretend that we live in a world where all those factors are the same and thus we can use the concept of guns to measure this. look at SK where that teacher committed suicide simply because of the ferry incident. or some safety officer at a concert in SK where people fell though a groundgate not surprising those two events happened and SK also happens to have a massive suicide rate. you are totally clueless on this topic. what we have to go on is 20K suicides a year from guns. with guns removed that is 20k lives on the table following a very real trend that a lot of them will not move on to another method.

these two points ruin your argument and yet you ignore them because they are inconvenient for you to acknowledge.

the argument is that sure we may be at 11.0 and some other country is at 12.0 but without guns those countries are still at 12.0 and for us that number drops when guns are removed. otherwise (if you refuse to acknowledge this) you are claiming that you are single handedly smarter than the entire field of psychology.

In England, death by asphyxiation from breathing oven fumes had accounted for roughly half of all suicides up until the 1970s, when Britain began converting ovens from coal gas, which contains lots of carbon monoxide, to natural gas, which has almost none. During that time, suicides plummeted roughly 30 percent — and the numbers haven't changed since.

the suicide argument is silly, people will off themselves no matter what. Bring in the fact that some liberal states are making suicide legal, your whole argument goes out the window. In 2000, suicides were only 1.2% of all deaths, 60% of those suicides were committed by some type of gun, so you are looking at less than 1%...

10th leading causing of death, 20K, but hey that's nothing right?

actually its more like 17k, but please quote me where I said that the number is nothing...

can we at least agree that 1 suicide is 1 too many right?

Some guy commits suicide because of something he reads in the paper, we don't rush to curtail the 1st Amendment. Some guy commits suicide because his church shuns him, we don't rush in to curtail religious freedom or freedom of association.

The suicide argument is specious. Your suicidal thoughts do not trump the Bill of Rights for everyone.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G870A using Tapatalk

(06-15-2016 09:58 AM)ark30inf Wrote:  Some guy commits suicide because of something he reads in the paper, we don't rush to curtail the 1st Amendment. Some guy commits suicide because his church shuns him, we don't rush in to curtail religious freedom or freedom of association.

The suicide argument is specious. Your suicidal thoughts do not trump the Bill of Rights for everyone.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G870A using Tapatalk

especially when you have examples of places like Great Britain where gun control is far more strict yet the overall incidence of suicide is almost identical to ours.

Yes, availability of guns leads to more gun suicides, but that doesn't mean that suicides go down if you eliminate guns. The issue should be to eliminate the causes of suicide, not the methods.

Wonder how the economy and jobs were doing in Washington during the '80's.

Black Swan events do it to us again.