[butter pecan fan]

An adolescent is twice as likely to commit suicide if a gun is kept in the home.

This is twisted lawyer speak. This statistic seems to want to correlate suicide by any means with gun ownership. Means nothing at all.

This statistic is probably the most interesting to me of the lot. Most of the others seem to be pure fluff, but there might be some meaningful information here. Is anybody familiar with the book named, its author, and particularly the source of this particular statistic?

[AppyPappy]

An adolescent is twice as likely to commit suicide if a gun is kept in the home.

The opposite is true for a telephone or electricity. Amish have lower suicide rates.

[FreeTally]

Snip.....Safety Expert Gavin de Becker has found in researching his books, The Gift of Fear and Protecting the Gift that:

Also, see post #14 for info on the author.

The suicide statistic is silly. With the number of Americans owning guns, one would expect that a high number of suicides may occur in a home with a gun. The number they quote makes me want to shrug my shoulders and say, "So what. Tell me what that means". The author just lets the reader imply that a gun in the home has something to do with one wanting to kill themself.

[discostu]

To me the only thing this shows is that suicidal children that have access to guns are more likely to succeed. Notice they only mention the successes (nothing about attempts) and they don't give you how many involve the gun. Looks like simple physical math to me. As anyone in the medical profession can tell you it's actually very difficult to make the human body stop being alive. Most of the methods that are available (short of guns) are either very slow to accomplish the task or very difficult to wield against yourself. Because of this the vast majority of suicide attempts fail, handguns are very quick to kill and not that hard to point at yourself the success rate with guns is sure to be higher. This is borne out in my circle of friends during those highly emotional teenaged/ young adult years, I know people with a suicide attempt total of about 30 (2 people account for a lot of this and really screw up the stat), only 3 attempts were successful 2 of those used guns (the third was in prison and couldn't get a gun). That right there gives the 2-1 ratio the article talks about, and completely ignores (much like the article) the one friend who tried a lot, never succeeded but also never used any of the guns in the house (step-father was a cop, mother was an enthusiast, no shortage of firearms in that house). Like all arguements to convince the most important part in these "statistics" is what they don't say.

[Castlebar]

This statistic is probably the most interesting to me of the lot. Most of the others seem to be pure fluff, but there might be some meaningful information here. Is anybody familiar with the book named, its author, and particularly the source of this particular statistic?

If most of the others seem to be pure fluff, then why did you post them as if they were just uttered by the burning bush?