And that is for a really interesting reason: The vast majority of Wyomingites appear to be, looked at closely, pro-suicide.
I mean, think about it. You don’t get Wyoming’s astounding number of suicides year after year unless you’re practically advocating for it.
Here’s a local commentator:
Like most good ol’ boys, [Wyoming St. Sen.] Kolb hemmed and hawed and found an excuse to do nothing, even while kids in his community kill themselves… [Kolb says:] “As soon as we start dragging [suicide] down the emotional road, we’ve lost… ”
Kolb’s attitude about suicide — that we shouldn’t get emotional about it, that we don’t really need to take action — reflects the cold-hearted stubbornness that has kept Wyoming from dealing with [the state’s suicide] crisis in any real way… [A]s long as people running the state maintain the same harmful and lazy attitude that caused our state to become the worst in the nation for suicide in the first place, we won’t see anywhere near the progress we need against this issue that tears so many of Wyoming’s families and communities apart.
Don’t get all boohoo. Don’t take action. Guns are there to kill people, including yourself if you feel like it.
Cowboy nihilism is super-chic. The macho charisma of killing yourself with Marlboros, Wyoming Whiskey, and a Kahr CM9 Polymer 9mm.
Second highest rate of car crashes in America, even though no one lives there. Most guns per capita in the nation. One psychiatrist every whatever … every five thousand miles…
This is a subtle and sensitive examination of the gun suicide epidemic, featuring Bob Owens, whose death was hypertypical.
[A] journalist who was friends with Owens said that many gun owners [like Owens] are afraid to tell doctors about their mental-health struggles, because they worry someone will take their weapons away.
Eh bien. UD’s heart goes out to these silent, lost, sufferers, but their logic’s a bit skewed. Surely they know they are overwhelmingly unlikely to need their twenty firearms for self-defense; surely they know (or at least intuit?) that those guns are far more likely to be used by someone in their home for suicide.
They may even know that the act will be impulsive – one drunk self-hating night; the failure to complete some task or other; a bad fight with your wife. Gun, stage left.
And it wouldn’t even be about taking the weapons away. It would be about temporarily locking them up until a crisis passed. But even that…
What does one say about flagrantly suicidal people who refuse to go to doctors and refuse to put away their guns?
Like most good ol’ boys, [Wyoming St. Sen.] Kolb hemmed and hawed and found an excuse to do nothing, even while kids in his community kill themselves… [Kolb says:] “As soon as we start dragging [suicide] down the emotional road, we’ve lost… ”
Kolb’s attitude about suicide — that we shouldn’t get emotional about it, that we don’t really need to take action — reflects the cold-hearted stubbornness that has kept Wyoming from dealing with [the state’s suicide] crisis in any real way… [A]s long as people running the state maintain the same harmful and lazy attitude that caused our state to become the worst in the nation for suicide in the first place, we won’t see anywhere near the progress we need against this issue that tears so many of Wyoming’s families and communities apart.
Give Wyomingites guns and they’ll kill themselves. Give them cars and …
Hell, why don’t your basic rodeo boy just kill himself by smashing his Chevy Suicido into a lightpole?
I’ll tell you why. First and most important when you use a Glock that ol gun will survive pulping your head fully intact, to be handed down to your suicidal son and his suicidal son ad infinifuckinitum. OTOH you’re definitely gonna total the truck. The truck’s goin down with you.
Secundum: It takes a whole lotta planning and a whole lotta luck to stage a successful trucko-da-fe. Maybe you’ll just go the paraplegic route. Maybe you’ll kill other people. The whole thing’s a big ol mess. At-home pulping, especially if you do it in the bathtub or shower, is neat and sweet and one hundred percent effective. State park pulping, a popular option among Wyoming’s rugged outdoorsmen, is even neater, and leaves you, as you expire, not with views of yourself careening agonizingly into a hard surface, but of calm majestic Tetons.
Thirdly: The whole public/private thing. The wreck’s gonna traumatize onlookers; and because it’s a news story it’ll make the local tv shows. Some guy popping his top at home is no news at all in Wyoming. Furthermore, beyond the extra expense your family will bear making you coffin-ready with your whole body pulverized vs. with just a little hole in your head, there’s the whole embarrassment on top of grief thing as the kinfolk deal with the community curiosity whipped up by the newspaper pix of your twisted truck/body.
A suicide cluster (seven of the deaths were suicides) emerges at North Carolina State, and the dreadful thing is that each suicide risks nudging another student on the edge over the edge. Suicide is contagious.
This is presumably (aside from privacy/family considerations) why the school fails to describe methods – you don’t want to give on-the-precipice students ideas.
“In any community there is always a certain number of people who are on the edge, and something as emotionally charged as a suicide (or multiple suicides) in the community (especially a small community) is frequently enough to tip more of them over.“
What we do know about the school’s suicides is suggestive. Anyone who followed the male/Asian clusters at other engineering schools not that long ago will wonder about the ethnicity of some of the students at NC State/engineering who may have killed themselves.
How many were gun suicides? UD wouldn’t be surprised if it were one hundred percent. It’s North Carolina, where guns are everywhere. Guns would help account for the school’s high number: With a gun you almost never, as it were, miss. Every other method gives you a bit of a fighting chance.
As for the draining, shell-shocked sensation NC students who are watching all of this report feeling: Well yeah. Jesus.
NONONONO. THAT is not the way to pass anti-suicide legislation in a state ALL of whose values are screamingly suicide-friendly. Why do you think Wyoming’s suicide rate is – by a wide margin – the highest in the nation? Why do you think some self-slaughtering Wyoming counties, their rates way higher than the rest of the state, are strewn with freshly-shot dead white male? Our Wyoming values are guns guns guns (the more guns you got, the more suicides you got), anti-therapy macho stoicism, alcoholism, driving your car like a bat outta hell and eventually right over a cliff, hatred of rules (like securing your guns), divorce, loneliness and long distances. Perfect toxic brew, but we’re Wyoming dammit and we wouldn’t have it any other way! No way any legislation’s gonna pass. Some American state has to stand for Amy Winehouse-style life-affirmation, and – haha! – I guess that’s us. Leemealone w/ my… uh… guns and booze fuck you I’ll do what I want and I spect my state rep to vote my way on this… BANG I’M DEAD.
*********************
‘Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) lost her primary — was that because Wyoming didn’t approve of her anti-Trumpism, or because she didn’t hold pre-announced campaign events because she faced so many threats?’
The Great State of Wyoming: If We Don’t Kill Ourselves, You Better Bet We’ll Kill YOU! You want Wyoming values? Here you go. We’re an officially violent state baby, so stand back and let us kill and be killed.
Over the years, I struggled with what came to be characterized as “major depressive disorder,” and took a cornucopia of medications. Nortriptyline, paroxetine, venlafaxine, buspirone, sertraline, citalopram, pregabalin, mirtazapine. None worked. Optimistically, I tried lurasidone, bupropion, and vilazodone, followed by aripiprazole, amitriptyline, and zaleplon, which also made no difference. Then Restoril, protriptyline, desipramine, escitalopram. Nothing. My psychiatrist began to talk ominously about “treatment-resistant depression.” Nonetheless, I carried on with fluoxetine, temazepam, triazolam, and trazodone.
Sing it.
Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money
Maybe we're ragged and funny
But we'll travel along singing a song
Side by side!
We don't know what's coming tomorrow
Maybe it's trouble and sorrow
But we'll travel the road sharing our load
Side by side!
When my deep depression
Makes me wish I were dead
I'll just grab my little buddy
Point you right at my head
When the booze and divorces undo me
When the cold lonely winters cut through me
I'll just go and unlock one of my Glocks:
Suicide!
… shifting in Wyoming, are you? A Wyoming senator is
… “surprised” that her office was flooded with calls [after the Uvalde massacre] from constituents expressing a deep desire to do something to stop the spate of mass shootings across the country…
Yeah what a shocker! She certainly assumed they didn’t give a shit.
[Cynthia] Lummis said callers to her office generally have not declared themselves for or against specific policy proposals, but have expressed a “willingness to be open to suggestions.” She also said they may be motivated to act by Wyoming’s high suicide rate.
“The surprise to me has been the number of people that have weighed in, not with particular solutions that they support, but with a willingness to be open to suggestions,” she said. “They’re worried in large about, as I’ve said, the mental health issue, and Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the nation.”
You could knock her over with a feather. Significant numbers of people in her state are upset about the SCADS of her constituents who use their guns to turn their own heads into tomato soup. How could Senator Loomis ever be expected to anticipate an upset reaction, much less, as Senator, do anything about all the gun suicides? Wyomingites love their guns!!!!! But jeez! Okay! If you insist…
An expert notes the firestorm of Republican ads featuring more and more desperate firearm brandishing.
UD gets this guy’s point that by 2024 guns in ads will be so routine that candidates will be blowing up Planned Parenthood offices to demonstrate their fervency.
But what about after that? What happens when not only guns are a snooze, but bombings elicit a shrug?
UD anticipates that, by 2028 or so, self-immolation will be the only way MAGA fanatics will be able to attract our attention.
They’re all over the news, and they’re of two kinds:
The reasonably explicable variety, which features people unable to sustain high levels of isolation and rigor, as in the recent rash of suicides on a navy ship. The numbers got so high that the navy evacuated the ship. These suicides share traits with prisoner suicide.
The more mysterious phenomenon of highly successful people destroying themselves at the height of their power and influence. Here we might think of the 2019 death of Alan Krueger; more recently, several young women athletes, all of whom had just won tournaments and awards, killed themselves. A highly promising young tv star just killed herself. On the verge of her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi Judd killed herself.
The cases of Judd and Krueger seem to involve a kind of existential exhaustion after years-long struggles with clinical depression. The powerful drugs, the endless therapy sessions, the setbacks – everything takes a toll on someone already fatigued and undermined. OTOH, although many young suicides have already exhibited some signs of being troubled, there’s nonetheless an impulsive – almost panicked – feel to some of these deaths. Bizarrely, their fate doesn’t seem gradual, but rather the outcome of a sudden access of horror at the thought of existing for one more second. Their end resembles a psychotic break featuring an insupportable hatred of being.
