Surprising fact: Half of gun deaths are suicides

I wonder if the framers of the constitution (and the bill of rights) thought the document they were crafting was perfect, every word voicing an immutable truth. I don't.

I can't argue the constitution doesn't a right to own firearms, there's plenty legal opinion out there which says it clearly does (on some level). But does that mean the constitution should always protect that right? You're obviously right, I don't get it. I don't get that the right to own a gun is a fundamental, God given right. I don't see in the same way I see speaking one's mind or the manner in which I choose to worship God.

You miss the point, JWK. The Constitution is the founding LEGAL document for the government of this country, just as the Declaration of Independence is the founding PHILOSOPHICAL document. The purpose of a Constitution is to set the rules. The Bill of Rights was added at the demand of the several states in order to place some items off-limits, among which was the right to arms. Why? Because the Declaration of Independence states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

If government holds a monopoly on the use of force, then the People have no way of performing their duty. Many argue that handguns and rifles are of no use against a military armed with jets, laser and satellite guided bombs, and nukes, and perhaps there is some truth in that. But individual members of government? They can fear the reaction of an armed populace.

Haven't you ever wondered why our elected officials in Washington are so worried about the armor-piercing capabilities of the .50BMG rifle? Specifically it's ability to defeat an armored limousine? Who rides around in armored limousines?

We've seen what governments can do to their unarmed populations. The carnage and mayhem that occurs in the U.S. on a daily basis isn't a patch on what an unchecked government can do to its people when it holds a monopoly on the use of force. So yes, I think the Constitution should always protect the right to arms.

Here's a quote for you to chew on:

Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.

History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. - Milton Friedman

One of those other conditions is a populace able to defend its own freedom against enemies, foreign and domestic.

If that was the case, the U.S. would be depopulated. Of the G8 nations, America ranks at #5 for suicide rates, despite the fact that the firearm is the method of choice here.

Here's the comparative data:

For males the G8 rankings are as follows (all in rates/100,000 population):

Russia: 69.3 (2002)
Japan: 35.2 (2000)
France: 26.1 (2001)
Germany: 20.4 (2001)
Canada: 18.4 (2000)
United States: 17.1 (2000)
United Kingdom: 11.8 (1999)
Italy: 10.9 (2000)

For females:

Japan: 13.4
Russia: 11.9
France: 9.4
Germany: 7.4
Canada: 5.2
United States: 4.0
Italy: 3.5
United Kingdom: 3.3

You'll note that Japan, with essentially ZERO firearms in private hands, ranks #2 for males and #1 for females.

Surprised? It would appear that, contrary to "common sense," guns don't CAUSE suicide.

Either that, or the French have a lot more "problems" than Americans do.

LOL... I like that, I too am an anti gun activist. It is extremism at its finest isn't it?

Why is it that anti-gun nuts are so violent? No wonder they don't trust other people with guns, they can't trust themselves!

Here's another quote:

T)he bearing of arms functions not merely as an assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart — because you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or succumb to bad temper, people will die.

Too many of us have come to believe ourselves incapable of this discipline. We fall prey to the sick belief that we are all psychopaths or incompetents under the skin. We have been taught to imagine ourselves armed only as villains, doomed to succumb to our own worst nature and kill a loved one in a moment of carelessness or rage. Or to end our days holed up in a mall listening to police bullhorns as some SWAT sniper draws a bead...

But it's not so. To believe this is to ignore the actual statistics and generative patterns of weapons crimes. Virtually never, writes criminologist Don B. Kates, are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception, murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g., automobile and gun accidents.

To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from the dignity of a free man would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.

This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms: that right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgment of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them.

We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.

And not only can we — we must. The Founding Fathers of the United States understood why. If we fail this test, we fail not only in private virtue but consequently in our capacity to make public choices. Rudderless, lacking an earned and grounded faith in ourselves, we can only drift — increasingly helpless to summon even the will to resist predators and tyrants (let alone the capability to do so).

Eric S. Raymond, Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun.

Kevin, while I appreciate your point. After being held at gunpoint and assaulted and having my step father leave his .357 in reach so that I could pick it up and discharge it, I find that most people in the possession of a gun, well... they aren't so intelligent.

I have a son and at home and I have too many friends whose children have attempted suicide, I am not going to aid them in a permanent attempt.

RebelGirl, I suggest that the problem isn't firearms, it's the class of people you associate with. Certainly your experience has skewed your perspective. My experience has been the exact opposite of yours - the people I know who possess firearms have been uniformly responsible and intelligent, and given that 40% or more of households in this country contain a firearm (or more than one), it would appear that the vast majority reflect my experience rather than yours.

So why is your perspective the "right" one, and mine wrong? One other point - as a self-described anti-gun activist, who do you think "gun control" laws would disarm, the people that you are familiar with, or the ones that I am? That is, those who are criminal and irresponsible, or the ones who are law-abiding and responsible?

Answer honestly.

I don't mind if you don't want a gun. Freedom also means the ability to choose not to do something. I simply object to other people telling me that I don't have a right that I very much do have.

Kevin, I never said I was right, or that you were wrong. I don't live in a black and white world. Both my brother in laws and my little sister have concealed weapons, I live in Texas, so trust me it is the norm here. I think its the fanatacism that concerns me, it is such a strong opinion that gun owners have that they are right and will argue the point to death.

My biggest issue is the ease and availablity, the fact that teens are committing crimes against other teens, at colleges, malls, etc. You are right its not the guns that are the problem, but someone isn't being cautious with their gun, because it is getting into the wrong hands and every day its a new headline and it becomes old news and no one seems to remember, no one seems to be working on a solution, the argument always comes back to "it's my right."

I look at the world and ask how can we solve the issue, not remove the guns, but find better ways of distributing them, tracking them, requiring some sort of limitation on use.

I am not saying you can't own one, or that I want them all banned, I am saying I will not own one, nor will I have one in a house with children.

I am not saying you can't own one, or that I want them all banned, I am saying I will not own one, nor will I have one in a house with children.

I would propose, then, that you are not an "anti-gun activist." You are someone who has made personal choice which you have every right to make. An anti-gun activist believes they have the authority to make that choice for everyone else, too.

LOL... I was hoping for someone to come to my rescue... I guess you are right. I still see it as Anti gun... minus the activist. ;O)

Of course, smart people like you, I am cool with owning a gun, especially if you got my back :L)

Thank you, Griff69, you took the words right out of my mouth, (so to speak.)

LOL.. Kevin Griff69, is always helping me get my foot out of my mouth... he swears he is going to make me a gun lover one day!

The thing that surprises most people is that shooting is FUN. It is also, I understand, "empowering" for many. I've introduced several people to shooting, and uniformly the reaction has been "this isn't scary anymore."

I don't mind if you don't want a gun, but I am reminded of the words of one of the subjects of Kyle Cassidy's book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes:

...one time out of a 101 where having a gun would have meant saving your own child – you would sell your soul, or trade everything you have to do that.

Granted, such incidents are rare - far more rare than "1 in 101," but ask Dr. William Petit Jr. (Google his name.) Or ask Texas (former) Congresswoman Suzanne Gratia Hupp.

Good luck to Griff69. And to you, no matter what your choice is.

LOL... thanks Kevin, he will have a hard time doing it, especially since he lives across the country, but we have had this similar debate a number of times. He too respects why I am terrified of them, maybe one day I will get there. My BIL's think they can do it too... but until then I am happy without one :L)

Well, if you're ever in the Tucson area, I have a standing offer on my blog:

If you have never shot a firearm, regardless of your position on the right to arms, and if you live near or visit the Tucson, AZ metropolitan area, I invite you to go shooting for a day.

I will provide the arms, ammunition, targets, safety equipment, range fees and instruction.

All you have to do is show up.

It's fun, I swear.

But either way, good luck to you and yours.

LOL my sister is in Phoenix, I fly in to Tucson sometimes so I might just take you up on it :L)

Bwauahaaahaaaa... We've got her surrounded now.

Griff... atleast I am surrounded by the good guys :L)

Yup. And the offer is real. Just Google "Kevin Baker." I'm the one who is NOT a published author. I believe my blog pops up as the last link on the first page. Contact information is available there. And some stuff you might find interesting to read.

Thanks Kevin... my BIL says we are going to walmart to buy Ammo... it's half off today! Maybe I will get brave and then you won't have to teach me when I take you up on your offer!

Tried to google you... couldn't find it, so if you don't mind send me the link... I am blonde work with me k?

Sure. How? Doesn't Newsvine frown on linking to anything? (I'm new here.) And I don't have any way to send you a link. My email (hold onto your socks) is gunrights-AT-comcast-DOT-net. No, I'm not kidding.

So the Second Amendment only applies to weapons available in 1791? Here's a quote from the dissent in a firearms case, California's Silveira v. Lockyer from 2002:

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or . . . the press" also means the Internet...and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths.... When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases - or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we're none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it's using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms.

This is part of that "70 years of precedent" that the Left is screaming about "being overturned." Now all nine Justices of the Supreme Court have said that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to arms (albeit four of them seem to have no idea exactly what that right is). Here's the next part of that dissent:

Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 (1939), did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller's weapon - a sawed-off shotgun - was reasonably susceptible to militia use. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller's claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller's test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a constitutional provision.

Here's part of a different dissent from that same case:

The panel opinion holds that the Second Amendment "imposes no limitation on California's [or any other state's] ability to enact legislation regulating or prohibiting the possession or use of firearms" and "does not confer an individual right to own or possess arms." The panel opinion erases the Second Amendment from our Constitution as effectively as it can, by holding that no individual even has standing to challenge any law restricting firearm possession or use. This means that an individual cannot even get a case into court to raise the question. The panel's theory is that "the Second Amendment affords only a collective right," an odd deviation from the individualist philosophy of our Founders. The panel strikes a novel blow in favor of states' rights, opining that "the amendment was not adopted to afford rights to individuals with respect to private gun ownership or possession," but was instead "adopted to ensure that effective state militias would be maintained, thus preserving the people's right to bear arms." It is not clear from the opinion whom the states would sue or what such a suit would claim were they to try to enforce this right. The panel's protection of what it calls the "people's right to bear arms" protects that "right" in the same fictional sense as the "people's" rights are protected in a "people's democratic republic."

--

About twenty percent of the American population, those who live in the Ninth Circuit, have lost one of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights. And, the methodology used to take away the right threatens the rest of the Constitution. The most extraordinary step taken by the panel opinion is to read the frequently used Constitutional phrase, "the people," as conferring rights only upon collectives, not individuals. There is no logical boundary to this misreading, so it threatens all the rights the Constitution guarantees to "the people," including those having nothing to do with guns. I cannot imagine the judges on the panel similarly repealing the Fourth Amendment's protection of the right of "the people" to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, or the right of "the people" to freedom of assembly, but times and personnel change, so that this right and all the other rights of "the people" are jeopardized by planting this weed in our Constitutional garden

Be careful what you wish for.

You might get it.

Also, Mike...excellent article, but thought contemporary style guidelines recommended using a word other than "successful" in reference to completed suicides.

Yet another reason to ignore the "pc" lunacy. Did the subject complete the objective? Then it was successful, by definition.