“If a guy is going to put a pistol to his head, drunk or sober, and pull the trigger, there’s simply nothing that can reasonably be done to stop that by anybody residing on earth.”
That’s not exactly true. Yes, there are determined people who will go through with it no matter what. But the huge majority can be interdicted if they can be delayed even by a few minutes. It’s very well documented and is the basis for suicide intervention. The very difficult thing is recognizing it in someone. Exceedingly difficult to see, especially since many of them seem to be doing better. And you cant know that means they already know their problems are all over.
I knew someone years ago who had at one time owned a successful business and had a wife and family and had even been a founder of a small church. He lost all that because he couldn’t leave alcohol alone and wound up working for every little business that would give him any kind of a job, never lasting long at any of them. He told me once that he came home to his apartment where he lived alone one day and went to the closet and picked up his twelve guage which he kept loaded, put the barrel to his head and pulled the trigger, he heard the firing pin snap on an empty chamber and threw the gun across the room by reflex as he realized what he had just done. He KNEW he had loaded the gun and there was no way he had unloaded it. Then he remembered that he had given a spare door key to a friend in case of emergency. He picked up the phone and called the guy and asked him if he had been in his apartment. He said the other fellow replied with a question, “What’s the matter, your shotgun didn’t go off?”
My older brother used to talk about someone he knew who told a story about deciding to kill himself. The man said he took a drink or two to calm his nerves while he thought about how to do it and decided to hang himself. He said he
figured that he could go into his attic, hang a noose from the ridgeboard at the peak of the roof and step off the joists onto the sheetrock ceiling which would of course shatter resulting in his death of a broken neck if he had the drop calculated correctly. By the time he thought it through he was apparently getting a little drunk and when he imagined his wife coming home and finding his body hanging down through a hole in the ceiling it struck him funny and he started laughing and he said he changed his mind and never really got to that point again.
In the one case alcohol cost the man everything except his life and that only because someone unloaded his gun, in the other it would seem that alcohol may have been the only thing that stopped him from suicide.
I have read that people are most likely to kill themselves soon after arising in the morning, I still remember a neighbor about half a mile from us who got up early one morning, stepped outside, stood next to the old house and put a shotgun to his head and pulled the trigger. I think I was twelve at the time. I have known a number of others over my seventy one years who have done something similar.
Another thing that I found with symptoms of suicide is one friend will see one and someone else another, etc., but putting the puzzle pieces together takes communication. We lack the small town everybody knows your name community.
.......well, I “think” you and I are essentially saying the same thing.
I’m sure not saying don’t try. I just think our government has proven without a doubt that it cannot count to 3 on anything much less stop suicide in the military.
I think privately funded support of some kind is what is needed.