Live in any other country than America, I guess, so an emotional person can't get their hands on a gun in two seconds.
Chances are there were pills in the medicine cabinet that could have been used as well. Or countless other ways that also take only a split second decision (and that's assuming she picked up the gun off the table and didn't have to go find it).
Come on, you're smarter than this.
While there are countless other ways to commit suicide, experience shows taking away just one of the tools can save many, many lives.
I have found two studies with that claim. One is going state by state (like there may be no other factors?) [1]. The second is comparing urban Maryland vs rural (if you've ever been to rural Maryland, you'd know comparing it to Baltimore is ridiculous) [2].
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/ [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/health/suicide-rates-mary...
0: https://www.nap.edu/read/18319/chapter/3#15 1: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-... 2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_06.pdf
The source actually says:
> Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008. > On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey.
It is a huge leap to say that approximately every defensive use of a firearm prevented a death. It does not come anywhere close to passing the sniff test, as we don't see unarmed people dying of crime in the massive numbers implied by your misquote.
> A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gun-wielding crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.
I agree that it's not a definitive link, which is part of why I said we need more data, but the it's not non-existent either. I wish police departments would track and report this statistic like they do murders and suicides.
Have similar statistics been acquired in other western countries, but with much more strict gun ownership laws, i.e. people can't protect themselves from violence?
It sound to me that it's a vicious circle, isn't it? Guns are easy to get -> bad people get guns -> good people need to get guns to protect themselves -> everybody is "fealing threatened for their lives".