Blind groper wrote:FBM wrote:If success at suicide were so dependent upon impulse, as you claim, this fails to explain why there are so many successful suicides in countries where it takes more sustained planning, time and effort to complete the act.
This is really frustrating. I try to explain but it falls on deaf ears.
Yes, I'm sure trying to convince people that an unworkable proposition is workable would be frustrating. That's why I don't do it. Instead, I look at reality and deal with it, instead.
The number of suicides depends on
a. Number of attempts
b. percentage of attempts that are successful
Hand guns affect point b. but not point a. If you have a country where there are heaps of attempts, there will end up an appreciable number of suicides, in spite of lack of hand guns.
The USA has a relatively small number of attempts, but a hell of a lot of those attempts succeed, because of hand guns.
Have you posted comparative statistics on the number of suicide attempts in the US compared to other countries? If so, I missed it. A lot of those attempts are completed with handguns, but that doesn't mean that they were completed
because of them. Correlation doesn't imply causation. You need to establish a separate body of data to establish causation. Logically, it's completely within reason to suggest that those people would have simply chosen whatever means available to them. And the success rate of handgun use isn't very much higher than that of hanging. Once you do the numbers, you're only talking about a few possible lives saved, and those only hypothetically.
a. Intent to kill oneself.
b. Available means.
There are a lot of b.-related options and the fact that the US doesn't have the highest rate of suicide suggests that the presence of handguns isn't a major factor.
Without the hand guns, the number of successful suicide attempts would be much lower.
Nowhere have you proven this to be true, nor have you taken into account the amount of violence that would ensue if the gummit were to try to confiscate handguns from those who own them.
The USA has about 0.075% of its population tries to commit suicide each year. Japan has a much higher percentage. The USA has 9% of those attempts end in death. In Japan the percentage of suicide attempts that succeed is lower, but because of the larger number of attempts, the final total of people killed is higher.
The reason such a high percentage (9%) in the USA ends in death is hand guns. Nothing else. Why is this so bloody difficult for you to understand?
Maybe because you haven't proven anything; you're just asserting it with flimsy evidence. Look, as I've mentioned before, I know your heart is in the right place. You want to prevent suicides by people who may later decide that they didn't want to kill themselves after all. Fine, so do I. But you're cherry-picking data and ignoring relevant facts that are put in front of you. The main one being that it won't work because the American people don't want to do it that way, and as long as the gummit is pretending to be a democracy, the politicians can't run roughshod over public opinion. It just won't work and continuing to harp about it is just beating a dead horse. It won't work and it will kill more people than it would save. Wake up. That's the American reality, for good or ill.
“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." ~ H. L. Mencken
"We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
