Guns aren’t lawful!

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master_of_suicide_06

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Suicide has become a very popular option of late, among farmers in India and suburbanites in the Amurrican Sunbelt, and it’s not hard to see why. When I contemplate my own expectations from Social Security, Miss Parker’s list of modalities tends to scroll down my mental movie-screen. But I long ago concluded, with her, that one might as well live — driven, in my case, by a novel-reader’s or movie-goer’s stubborn need to know what happens next, even if the book is by Dan Brown or the film by Stephen Spielberg. Hell, even if the film is Sophie’s Choice. I almost never walk out, no matter how bad it is.

A kind friend recently sent along this item:

Gun suicides now outpace traffic fatalities in Colorado
Experts say suicide must be framed as public health issue

Gun deaths have outpaced motor vehicle fatalities in Colorado since 2009, but data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment indicate the state has passed yet another milestone in death statistics.

For the first time in 2012, suicides by firearm alone surpassed motor vehicle fatalities, with 457 Coloradans dying in fatal car crashes and 532 taking their own lives using guns.

Gun suicides experienced their biggest increase in the past 12 years between 2011 and 2012, jumping up nearly 20 percent. Experts say many of these deaths are preventable, but that prevention requires framing suicide as a public health issue….

… Gun suicides didn’t take the biggest chunk of the increase. Fatal, self-inflicted gunshot wounds increased by nearly 29 percent while suicides by other means increased by nearly 64 percent.

Of course the phrase ‘experts say’ in itself is an incitement to suicide — I want to hang myself every time I hear it. But leaving that aside, there is much to puzzle over in this story.

The reporter acknowledges, for example, that gun suicides have increased less rapidly than those consummated by poison, rivers, gas, nooses and the rest of Miss Parker’s morbid list. Yet the story is framed as one about guns. Why?

Then of course there’s the comparison with road deaths. It seems to be okay for people to die on the road — though how many of those deaths are suicides too? A lot, I bet. But it’s not okay to check out under your own volition, simply because the deal on offer from our advanced civilization seems less appealing than the endless velvety dark. That’s cheating. Why do you get to go home earlier than everybody else?

No; it’s a ‘public health issue’, crying out for a technical solution; as if suicide were something like cholera, a problem that might be addressed by better drains.

Actually, I suspect suicide is in fact such a problem. If nobody ever had to worry about living in a cardboard carton above a heating grate, for example, I daresay fewer people would blow their brains out, or hang themselves, or jump in front of a subway. On the other hand, as technical solutions go, this one is perhaps a bit more far-reaching than anybody wants to contemplate. Why, it’s… it’s Communism!

6 thoughts on “Guns aren’t lawful!”

  1. American prisons provide us with a model of the future, where monitored group movement and individual caging can even prevent the release of death.

    Against plutocracy, the necessary countermove for the working class is suicide, and the elites’ necessary countermove is to prevent that suicide (anything, rather than share the loot). Generational chess drives us inevitably toward the immortal banker’s hell where you have the option neither to lay down and sleep nor lay down and die. Envy those brave enough to have sold before the market dropped.

  2. “The reporter acknowledges, for example, that gun suicides have increased less rapidly than those consummated by poison, rivers, gas, nooses and the rest of Miss Parker’s morbid list. Yet the story is framed as one about guns. Why?”

    I would guess it’s because you can take guns away but the rest of the items on the list are too ubiquitous to get rid of. I’d argue you could take cars away too and in fact I think we should but it is ingrained within people that they simply must have a car. A substantial number of people support taking guns away (a minority, but still). Nobody but cranks like me and a few others contemplate taking cars away.

  3. ‘Civilization’ has been around, what, a few thousand years? There were people doing other types of people stuff for a lot longer than we have been concerning themselves with some rickety construct that doesn’t actually explain anything.

    Billions of people are currently enduring the reckoning we are so concerned might be visited upon us. We are the lucky ones. Mother Nature does not care about universal health care, she does not care about our version of fairness. One of the biggest blind spots that I have is that in those moments of quiet thought, when I’m sitting in a comfortable chair in a warm, cozy coffee shop or library, some glittering ideal flashes before my mind clear and whole. Then I take that ideal, and instead of ruminating over it and basking in it’s fragile glow, I crumple it up and throw it at the rest of the world for not living up to that standard.

    • “Billions of people are currently enduring the reckoning we are so concerned might be visited upon us.”

      Yes. There’s been an explosion of literature and movies lately fretting over the “end of the world and ‘civilization” etc — “The Road” and the like. Always posed as a What if, rather than an It’s Happening Right Now. There are many places on Planet Earth at the moment that resemble The Road, and some brought there by our imperial hand.

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