#We need to go deeper guns professional#
This makes sense based on what experts know about what triggers a desperation large enough to want to end a life.Ī person who is suffering deep psychological pain may ponder suicide for months or years-but only when they have a heightened emotional crisis that renders them blind to other solutions do they take action, explains Janel Cubbage, M.S., a licensed clinical professional counselor in Baltimore and a program manager at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
“When you look at the data, it turns out people do not substitute another equally lethal method when they can’t get a gun,” he says. Yet studies don’t bear this out, Miller says. For example, gun safety arguments are often countered with the idea that someone who wants to kill themselves will doggedly find a way to do it, if not with a gun than some other means. What we still need to learn about suicideĪ key reason this type of gun death is often overlooked in the discourse around curbing the epidemic of gun violence is the misconceptions many people have about gun suicides, says Matthew Miller, M.D., a professor of health sciences and epidemiology at Boston’s Northeastern University and a researcher in the field. “Being a survivor of gun suicide often leaves long-term physical, emotional, and social trauma that can alter the physical and mental health, choices, and lifelong trajectory” of everyone left behind,” says Sarah Burd-Sharps, the senior research director at Everytown for Gun Safety (Everytown’s grassroots network includes Moms Demand Action). Worse, gun suicides in young people are up a startling 53% in that time frame.Īnd no statistic can convey the anguish of people like Gwen, who pours her grief into volunteering with the Michigan chapter of Moms Demand Action, a grassroots gun safety movement, and consoling other surviving moms through her work. Gun suicides now kill nearly 24,000 Americans each year (an average of 64 every day!), according to the advocacy and education group Everytown for Gun Safety, up 12% from a decade earlier. But the largest number of firearm deaths-some six out of every ten fatalities-come via suicide, and the number is growing. When we think of firearm tragedies, it’s often the mass shootings and crime-related homicides that fill the evening news. “The fallout is awful, and it continues,” Gwen says now. The tragedy ultimately broke up Gwen’s marriage and sparked a mental-health crisis for her other son, age six at the time. “I had no idea the gun was in that drawer,” she says. In the swirl of a busy life, Gwen, a 47-year-old psychiatric nurse practitioner in Milan, MI, simply hadn’t realized that after the family moved to their new home that summer, the gun, along with more than half-dozen others in her husband’s collection, were no longer properly secured in lockers.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling 988, texting “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741, or going to While they were gone, Jonah, who turned out to have stayed in his bedroom, retrieved his father’s handgun from a hall dresser drawer and killed himself.
With her husband still at work, Gwen took her younger children and live-in mother-in-law out of the house to run an errand. When their argument finally ended, Gwen assumed Jonah went out walking-something he regularly did to calm down. Since second grade, Jonah had struggled with mental health issues for which he had seen several psychiatrists over the years, and for which he was hospitalized twice. That’s when she and Jonah, then 17, got into a disagreement about politics that escalated. And she marvels at how well he seemed to be doing, starting an early college program while still in high school.īut her memory of one autumn night in 2016 is always top of mind. She recalls how he adored pickup basketball, especially as a six-foot-two teenager. When Gwen La Croix thinks about her son Jonah, she remembers her creative child always drawing his favorite character, Sonic the Hedgehog.
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