Posted on 10/02/2004 11:06:50 PM PDT by neverdem
EDITORIAL OBSERVER
For devoted foes of gun control, September was a banner month. It opened with Congress ignoring pleas from every major national police group to let the hard-won 1994 ban on assault weapons expire, and ended last week with the House approving a loony measure repealing Washington's strict gun laws.
And that's not all. In between reinstating every hunter's sacred Second Amendment right to nail Bambi with an AK-47, and mischievously meddling in local affairs to pass a one-chamber bill to weaken public safety in the nation's capital, the National Rifle Association and its busy-beaver allies quietly scored another legislative coup - this one without even trying. This little-noted achievement - if you can call it that - relates to a glaring omission in the new initiative to prevent youth suicide just approved by the House and Senate, and awaiting President Bush's signature.
Named for Garrett Lee Smith, the 21-year-old son of Senator Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon, who killed himself in his college dorm room a year ago, the measure addresses a serious problem. Some 4,000 young Americans take their own lives each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is impossible not to admire Senator Smith's determination to wring something positive from his terrible personal tragedy by going public with his family's pain, and rallying colleagues on both sides of the aisle to get behind legislation to expand counseling services and other state efforts to identify and help youngsters at risk of killing themselves. There's no question that the $82 million the legislation authorizes over the next three years to improve early-intervention suicide prevention efforts, including on college campuses, will save some lives (albeit fewer than it might have, owing to a parental consent requirement right-wing House Republicans insisted upon that will inevitably deter some troubled kids from getting timely help).
But the bill's positive aspects notwithstanding, it fails to address perhaps the most salient risk factor for troubled young people - the presence of a gun in the home. This avoidance is particularly frustrating given the scant chance that Congress will revisit the teenage suicide issue anytime soon, and the fact that it doesn't take a brain surgeon - just a lowly editorial writer - to see a couple of common sense steps that Congress could have taken to protect kids, and didn't take.
Firearms figure in about half of all youth suicides, and by now it is neither secret nor speculative that having a firearm at home significantly increases the chance of a depressed adolescent ending his or her own life. Nor should it come as a surprise that states with the highest rates of gun ownership also have the highest overall suicide rates.
Perhaps the most obvious way to reduce the deadly toll would be to insist that parents do a better job of locking up guns. Even as Congress was deliberating over fine print of the antisuicide bill, a telling new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Annenberg Public Policy Center appeared in the Aug. 4 Journal of the American Medical Association. This study found an 8.3 percent decrease in suicide rates among 14- to 17-year-olds in 18 states that have enacted some form of child access prevention, or C.A.P., law, making it a crime to store guns carelessly in a way that permits easy access by kids.
Why are there no provisions in the antisuicide bill creating federal incentives to encourage states without C.A.P. laws to adopt them, following the approach successfully used to nudge states to tighten their drunken driving rules? Why does the new legislation omit the simple life-saving step of requiring gun dealers to provide an effective safety lock with every weapon sold?
When I directed these questions to a couple of the measure's supporters, they politely suggested I must be living on another planet. As it was, they had to accept the damaging parental consent language to get the bill through the House. Including the sort of child-protective gun provisions I was talking about would have invited rabid reflexive opposition from the gun lobby, very likely dooming any progress at all on the teenage suicide issue. "The power of the lobby is tremendous, and anything hinting of gun control, however sensible, is radioactive, especially in the House," explained Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, a lead Democratic sponsor of the teenage suicide bill along with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and a strong gun control supporter.
It is hard to quarrel with Senator Dodd's political assessment. But what a grim reflection on the present climate in Washington that small, reasonable steps like mandatory trigger locks cannot be openly raised and debated even in the context of trying to prevent children from committing suicide. Fear of the gun lobby is such, the subject never came up.
Just like the British made the people of Boston keep their guns, and powder, in local arsenals, promising them they could have them back if they left town. They didn't give them back of course.
Gun control was the proximate cause of the American Revolution when the Brits marched out of Boston to try to collect the colonist's arms. sKerry, Fienstein, Schummer, et. al. are trying for a repeat I guess. They should recall who came out on top in that little affair.
Works for me, barbarian that I am. But I'll keep my firearms too, thank you very much.
Oh, please! They don't want us to eat meat, either.
There is that too.
What the HELL? These people actually think they're helping by focusing on the firearms, instead of the root causes of suicide? Is it OK if we proclaim them officially certifiably insane now?
BTW, anyone notice the error in the first sentence? I doubt seriously if all those folks were pleading for Congress to let the ban expire. But they should have been.
Or if they oppose the same round being used if only it's fired from a bolt action or maybe even the fairly innocuous looking Ruger Mini-30. (Of course some of them have a small clue, but that just motivates them to ban the Ruger as well, as the Kerry (along with Clinton, Kennedy, Fienstein, Schumer and the other "usual suspects" in the Senate) cosponsored S.1431 would do)
Methods of suicide among persons aged 10-19 years--United States, 1992-2001.
The Effect of Nondiscretionary Concealed Weapon Carrying Laws on Homicide.
The FOPA was a good step towards removing many of the infringement of the 1968 Gun Control Act, and in reigning in the BATF. Right up until the last minute addition of the machine gun ban, that is. But the addition was so last minute that it and the bill passed before anyone could really evaluate it's actual meaning. (It's poorly written and of taken literally it would mean nothing, but the intent is enforced rather than the actual language.)
So yes, the NRA did support and push the FOPA, but the not the machine gun ban. The was your typical o'dark thirty gun control. It might have even been intended as a poison pill, but because it was so poorly written, no body recognized in time to block it before the law passed in both houses with the amendment still attached.
Great catch. I am surprised, actually. Horrible topic. Would "suffocation" including hanging oneself?
More speculation, could a decline in Bible study in the home be proportional to the increase in suicide?
The most common method of suicide in this age group was by firearm (49%), followed by suffocation (mostly hanging) (38%) and poisoning (7%). (2nd sentence of the abstract)
Small price to pay to keep the tyrants at bay...lets look at the stats in terms of national population...
4000 suicides?
Given the 293 Million people in the US...thats a whopping 0.00136518771% of the population...
One-One Thousandth of a percent...Big friggin deal
2000 with guns?
Guns alone and its 0.00068259386% of the populaton...
And finally...this...
This study found an 8.3 percent decrease in suicide rates among 14- to 17-year-olds in 18 states that have enacted some form of child access prevention
Lets see 8.3% of 0.00068259386% is 0.00005665529%!!!
Its not about saving kids...its about disarming those who stand in the way of tyranny...Make No Mistake.
I am not losing sleep over 4000 kids checking out...
It's my contention that gun control, even if the controls were only in force to keep the guns out of the hands of a kid who wants to shoot himself, would actually cause more deaths than it would save due to the inaccessability of the weapon when it is needed for its righteous purpose.
Translation: Well, this tactic didn't work. What's the next tragedy we can latch onto like a bunch of ghouls?
At least the title recognizes that the anti-gun lobby understands that congresscritters who want to get re-elected learned their lessons in '94.
I found this line MOST interesting!
"along with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, and a strong gun control supporter."
"Sierra Harry" Reid (D-NV) claims to be a strong supporter of our RKBA, I guess the author forgot to carry on Harry's spin! Harry has managed to be rated "B" by the NRA, he is a slick liar.
The NRA is not formally endorsing either candidate in the Nevada senate race, but perhaps Nevada voters who care about our RKBA can get a strong hint that they need to support Richard Ziser (Rated "A" by NRA) from this authors slip of the pen!
7.62x39 is ballistically near identical to a 30-30.
From what I hear the SKS is used fairly often from tree stands, at about 50 yards.
I know a few people who use MAK - 90's to hunt rabbits, very few use actual AK's as they are full-auto.
It is very important to maintain the manufacture of fine fire arms like Smith and Wesson and Colt etc. We can't have teens killing themselves with cheap Saturday night specials.
I thought you would say Tom McClintock.
Yes, it's okay.
We also need to bear in mind that the United States is on par with other "civilized" societies in our suicide statistics. Kids killing themselves is a horrific tragedy by any means, however, in Japan, where there is no access to firearms, there is a higher per capita suicide rate than in the United States. This is true of several countries around the world, many without civilian access to firearms. Here in Connecticut, we had a 12 year old child hang himself in his closet. It was the saddest thing I've seen in a very long time. The fact is, suicide happens regardless of access to a firearm, and someone who is depressed enough to kill himself is going to find the means and tools to do it. Trying to use suicide as an anti-gun excuse just doesn't fly.
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